More than a year ago, the environmental affairs department of South Africa announced plans for a pact with the government of Vietnam to try to curb rhino poaching. What’s happened since then? This year poaching has already reached a record high in South Africa, with 455 confirmed kills so far this year. Meanwhile, Vietnam has been named the world’s worst for wildlife crime, with officials regularly taking wildlife parts as bribes. And now the kicker: South Africa’s environmental affairs officials say that Vietnam snubbed them to avoid signing an anti-poaching agreement.According to Mail & Guardian, the South African government announced in September that the long-awaited memorandum, which officials hoped would curb the flow of rhino horn into Vietnam, would be signed in Hyderabad, India at a conference of signatories to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. But according to a department spokesman, Vietnamese officials were “not available” to sign the the document. From the Mail & Guardian report:In April this year environment minister Edna Molewa said her department asked Vietnam’s ministry of agriculture and rural development to “conduct inspections and verify that white rhinoceros trophies exported from South Africa to Vietnam are still in the possession of the hunters”.
This week, Singh said Vietnam’s authorities had yet to provide South Africa with any evidence that trophies exported to Vietnam were still in the possession of the original hunters. “The Vietnamese authorities [have] indicated that they would only be able to conduct inspections late in 2012,” she said.
South Africa and Swaziland are the only countries in the world where rhinos can be legally hunted for sport. “Personal” hunting trophies can also be legally exported, but only the hunter in whose name the hunting and export permits were issued can legally possess the trophy.South Africa starting denying hunting permits to Vietnamese hunters earlier this year because middlemen were coming to kill rhinos, only to sell their horns at high prices back in Vietnam. Aside from the fact that that flouts basic ethics of hunting — not “eat what you kill,” exactly, but if you want to bag a threatened trophy animal, you don’t deserve it if you’re too lazy to go out and actually shoot it yourself — that system of horn-brokering has likely added more fervor to an already-turbulent market. If the only way to get horn was to track down a rhino and kill it, that’s one thing. But if horn, which is already a status symbol in Vietnam, is subject to bidding wars, like it is in this system, it’s only going to become more sought after.Of course, that whole preceding paragraph ignores a very worthwhile question: Why the hell can rhinos be legally hunted in the first place? Vietnam — and China, and Singapore — has an insatiable appetite for horn, and the thinking that allowing a regulated hunting industry will help curb illegal poaching is total hogwash. And as long as horn is quasi-legal, enforcement is made that much harder. It’s not like they have barcodes on them to say if they were acquired legally or not. Rhinos are being killed at an incredible pace, and if South Africa wants to be serious about protecting them, it should be serious about protecting all of them, not just the ones that it hasn’t sold a hunting tag for.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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