Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta has signed up as a founding member to the pan-African Giants Club to combat an illegal wildlife trade that has devastated Africa’s elephant herds.
In a long-awaited move, he also committed to the Elephant Protection Initiative, launched in London in February last year, supported by dozens of African countries struggling to eradicate the increasingly lucrative ivory trade.
Some 100,000 elephants have been killed across Africa in the past three years.
“Kenya has a long history of leading the way in Africa on wildlife issues and the step made by President Kenyatta today in joining the Giants Club, and as part of that committing Kenya to the EPI, continues that great and proud tradition,” said Evgeny Lebedev, patron of Space for Giants, which established the Giants Club, and owner of the Evening Standard and Independent newspapers.
Conservationists fear that poaching, fuelled by soaring demand for ivory in the Far East, particularly China, has reached such a critical point that it threatens to tip Kenya’s elephant population into a terminal decline that could eventually wipe out its herds.
As part of the initiative, Kenya yesterday commissioned the first independent inventory of its massive ivory stockpiles, a move billed by conservationists as a crucial step in the war against illegal poaching.
The inventory comes on the back of an earlier pledge by Mr Kenyatta to burn the country’s entire ivory stockpile — thought to be more than 100 tons, among the world’s largest — by the end of the year, a symbolic action aimed at robbing it of commercial value.
Originally Published by The Standard
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