Why Are Most of Tanzania’s Elephants Disappearing?

Tanzania’s elephant population has plummeted by more than 60 percent during the past five years, the country’s government announced this month.

Elephants in this East African country—a major, if not the world’s biggest source of illegal ivory—were estimated to number only 43,330 at the end of 2014, down from 109,051 in 2009.

Tanzania’s Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism, Lazaro Nyalandu, says the drastic decline might be because elephants had migrated into neighboring countries. The ministry, he said recently, is trying “to find out what happened to these elephants.”

Mary Rice, Executive Director of the Environmental Investigation Agency, an environmental watchdog group, says that response suggests that Tanzania is still not serious about tackling the real root of its elephant crisis: corruption and official collusion with Chinese-led transnational criminal gangs, according to EIA. (Tanzania’s Foreign Minister has denied that government officials are involved in ivory smuggling.)

Rice leads EIA’s elephant campaign, which has been investigating the flow of illegal ivory from Africa to China and other countries, mainly in Asia, for the last decade.

Read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150612-tanzania-environmental-investigation-agency-mary-rice-elephants-poaching-cites-corruption/

Collected:

Maraya Cornell, National Geographic