Rhino killings will never stop, expert predicts
29 Apr 2013The Star Early EditionADELE DU TOIT AND DALE HES
Rhino killings will never stop, expert predicts
FORMER Kruger National Park director Dr Salomon Joubert says the authorities will not win the war against rhino poaching.
Speaking during the recent launch of his new book, Kruger National Park: A History, in Mbombela, Mpumalanga, he said the number of rhinos being poached was surpassing the number being born annually.
“The white rhino population has historically enjoyed a 5-8 percent increase annually, but the mortality rate is now surpassing this, placing the population in very real danger,” explained Joubert, who lived in the park for 40 years and served as director from 1986 to 1994.
He said the huge outcry against poaching would not change things.
“Despite the huge outcry against it, rhino poaching will never stop. This is a huge problem, and I suspect that the number of issues that need to be addressed are far too much for the practice to be stamped out completely.”
According to the latest figures released by the Department of Environmental Affairs, 249 rhinos have been poached in South Africa this year. Some experts predict that this number could reach close to 1 000 by the end of 2013.
In 2010, a total of 333 rhinos were killed in South Africa; 405 in 2011; and 633 last year.
It is believed that the exponential rise in rhino poaching has been fuelled by rocketing demand in Asia and the emergence of highly organised crime syndicates operating in South Africa and neighbouring Mozambique.
Joubert said corruption within the government was also a major factor.
“People are corruptible. Not only do the financial rewards appeal to the desperate souls who are recruited to do the dirty work, but also to people throughout the ranks. This includes officials within the KNP and those in government, and is symptomatic of a large management problem. Discipline and passion for conservation are waning,” added Joubert.
He argued that South Africa was not doing enough to help address the problem in Mozambique.
“South Africa is not intervening. At the moment we do not have control over the assets that are our rhinos. So until we have organised ourselves and secured our assets, poaching will continue.”
It has also been reported that poachers have wiped out the entire rhino population on the Mozambican side of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.
The transfrontier park includes the Kruger, Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park, as well as Gonarezhou Park in Zimbabwe.
During a recent media tour, Kruger Park’s head of conservation, Dr Freek Venter, said Mozambican authorities had different laws regarding rhino poaching and that the stiff sentences given to poachers in South Africa were not applicable in Mozambique.
“The Mozambican authorities are not coming to the party. They don’t take the issue as seriously as us and they do not have nearly enough resources to do anything about it,” he said. – African Eye News Service It is always nice to be able to blame someone else for your problems, but in the case of the rhino poaching crisis it has become increasingly clear that both Mozambique and Vietnam bear a heavy responsibility. As the measures taken against poachers in the worst-hit area of South Africa – the Kruger National Park – take on the trappings of an antiinsurgency operation, the toll taken on rhinos continues to rise. The figures speak for themselves: in 2010 146 Kruger rhinos were listed as killed. In 2011 it was 252 and last year the toll soared to 425. So far this year 180 rhinos are known to have been killed in the reserve. In fact the toll is even worse, as an extraordinary series in The Star by reporter Shaun Smillie and photographer Chris Collingridge has shown.
Our team gained access to Mozambican “poaching villages”, where comparative wealth from the proceeds of rhino poaching is conspicuous. Poachers are feted, as are pirates in the towns along the coast of Somalia established as a result of ship hijacking. And our team discovered the death toll is even higher than the official statistics, which do not take into account the rhinos which stray across into Mozambican territory, never to be seen alive again. Mozambique is clearly culpable of either not have the will to curb poaching, or of deliberately turning a blind eye.
Much of the rhino horn hacked off in the Kruger or neighbouring Mozambican territories ends up in Vietnam, where it is prized as a treatment for a variety of ailments. Curbing the incursions of Mozambican poachers, and reducing the appetite in Vietnam would do much to address South Africa’s rhino poaching crisis.
