The United States is taking unprecedented measures to save African elephants, President Obama told a group of Kenyans on Monday who gathered at Kenyatta University in Nairobi to see the first sitting American president to visit their country.
In addition to announcing new restrictions on the ivory trade in the U.S. on Saturday, Obama said his administration is trying to write similar bans into trade agreements, such as the pending 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“One of the things we’re trying to accomplish in the trade agreement is for many of these countries with still strong demand for ivory to start getting much more serious about the enforcement of their laws, and have it embedded in the trade agreements that we initiate,” Obama told members of Kenya’s Civil Society on Sunday. “So, hopefully, we’ll be able to influence not just what happens in the United States, but also in some of the areas where the demand is heaviest.”
Tom Lalampaa of the Northern Rangelands Trust begged Obama to help groups like his “crush” the demand for ivory.
The “markets and the demand, Mr. President, are far outside our borders,” Lalampaa told Obama during his first trip to his father’s homeland since becoming president. “We are helpless. Please help us.”
The U.S. is the world’s second-biggest ivory market.
On Saturday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced new rules restricting domestic ivory commerce and banning commercial exports. Combined with existing laws, such as Obama’s 2013 executive order combatting wildlife trafficking, those rules “will result in a near total ban on the domestic commercial trade of African elephant ivory,” according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Referencing that action, Obama told the Kenyan audience: “I mean, we really are cracking down on that.”
However, his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, noted on Sunday that completely banning ivory in the U.S. is virtually impossible.
“I think our view is that we pushed this as far as we absolutely could in terms of banning the trade of ivory to the United States,” Rhodes told reporters traveling with Obama on Sunday. [B]eing able to place a universal ban on anything involving ivory is “extraordinarily difficult” because existing goods, such as antique furniture and some musical instruments, include ivory.
The U.S. is trying to lead by example because of the spike in demand for ivory, Rhodes said. The administration hopes “to set a standard that we can try to bring other countries, particularly in Asia, toward.”
Lalampaa asked Obama to help conserve Africa’s dwindling wild elephant population by signing and encouraging other world leaders to sign a conservation agreement that nine African countries have entered into. In the last few years, 30,000 elephants have been poached.
Obama said Africans have to convince each other that conservation is in their best interest. If people “see a false choice between their own livelihoods and conserving animals, then the animals will lose,” Obama said.
Another conservationist, Paula Kahumbu, told Obama that Kenya has made strides in cracking down on poachers.
“Our work has led to the arrest of one of the most … notorious suspected ivory kingpins, Feisal Mohamed Ali,” she told Obama. “For the first time in Kenya, an ivory trafficker is behind bars.”
But elsewhere in Africa, trafficking is on the rise, Kahumbu said. “We’re dealing with people who are funding terrorism; and we’re dealing with a crime that is fueled by corruption.” She asked Obama to pursue international wildlife traffickers the same way the U.S. targets drug lords and money launderers.
“And with respect to the international networks, you’re absolutely right that there’s a connection between corrupt officials getting paid, criminals being armed and the ivory trade,” Obama replied.
As part of Obama’s five-day trip to Ethiopia and Kenya, the White House announced additional measures the administration is taking to save elephants, rhinoceros, tigers and other endangered species.
The U.S. will spend $800,000 to conduct a three-year poaching and trafficking assessment, among other things, in Kenya. It will also give Gabon’s National Park Agency $7 million annually for five years “to secure the largest remaining population of forest elephants in Africa,” pay for a $300,000 report studying the trade’s money flow and assign wildlife law enforcement attachés to Botswana and Tanzania.
