'LAST CHANCE' FOR ELEPHANT DEAL !

'Last chance' for elephant deal
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website, The Hague.

Clues in the ivory jungle
Markets push illegal ivory

African nations are engaged in last-ditch negotiations on elephants and ivory as the end of a major wildlife trade meeting nears.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting closes on Friday and a compromise deal appears elusive.
Some African countries want to expand the ivory trade, others to shut it down for several years.
But some observers believe enforcement is the big missing issue.
The flurry of new proposals greeting delegates at the beginning of Tuesday, the conference's seventh working day, spoke of last-minute bids to find common ground.
Delegates from elephant range states had been meeting daily, but two conflicting views still prevailed.
"It's a difficult issue, and that's why there are two fundamentally different approaches," commented Michael Wamithi, international advisor for Africa to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw).
Regional divide
CITES has twice allowed southern African countries to sell limited quantities of ivory from stockpiles to Japan, as exceptions to the 1989 global trade moratorium.

CITES EXPLAINED
Threatened organisms listed on three appendices depending on level of risk
Appendix 1 - all international trade banned
Appendix 2 - international trade monitored and regulated
Appendix 3 - trade bans by individual governments, others asked to assist

"Uplisting" - moving organism to a more protective appendix, "downlisting" - the reverse
Conferences of the Parties (COPs) held every three years
CITES administered by UN Environment Programme (Unep)
At the beginning of this two-week meeting, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe had asked for annual export quotas of ivory from stockpiles.
"The Namibian elephant population has more than doubled in the last decade," said Namibia's environment and tourism minister Willem Konjore, "and illegal killing has been so low as to be insignificant".
The "willingness of the rural community to co-exist and share resources with elephants" would be maintained, he suggested, if elephant products brought a supply of money back to the communities.
Kenya and Mali, meanwhile, had submitted a proposal requesting a 20-year moratorium on any further sales.
Tuesday brought two new proposals on the issue from the Kenyan camp, another two from southern Africa and one from the EU.
Collectively the documents speak of a further one-off ivory sale rather than annual quotas, liberalisation of other commercial and non-commercial uses of elephant products, and a moratorium of six, nine or 12 years rather than 20 on further sales.
After a brief debate and a recognition that these proposals cut across each other, delegates disappeared into side-rooms for what one participant suggested might be an all-night sitting.
Missing the point?

Illegal ivory markets pose a major problem.
A further Kenyan document sought to plug what some saw as the big hole in all these discussions - the high levels of poaching and low levels of enforcement in many African countries.
Tom Milliken, director of the southern and eastern Africa office of the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic, presented the latest results from the Elephant Trade Information System (Etis) which collates data on illegal ivory seizures.
"We are now seeing a sharp upturn in seizures," he told delegates.
"The fact it's occurring now is a matter for concern because it occurs after the adoption of the African Action Plan at the last CITES meeting (in 2004), which was designed to close down the world's illegal ivory markets."
With the exception of Ethiopia, he said, few African countries had shown much improvement since then in their control of illegal markets. Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo he described as countries of particular concern.
Of importing countries, Mr Milliken named China as a nation which has "demonstrated progressive improvement", but which faces major challenges.
Several delegates commented that unless these illegal markets can be controlled and shut down, there is little point in spending endless hours finessing the regulations surrounding legal sales.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

BBC NEWS REPORT.