Will China kill all Africa’s elephants?

27 March 2010

Aidan Hartley investigates the illegal ivory trade in Tanzania, and discovers that hundreds of kilos of bloody tusks from poached elephants are being smuggled out each year

Their biggest customer, they said, was a Chinese man who bought 200 kilos at a time. ‘He’s VIP,’ said Daudi.

‘VIP?’ I queried. ‘Is he a diplomat — at the embassy here?

‘Yeah. Yeah. Chinese government.’ Daudi said the Chinese VIP used his diplomatic bag to smuggle ivory out of Tanzania. ‘Nobody checks,’ he said.

Then he claimed that last year Chinese officials who flew into Dar es Salaam accompanying President Hu Jintao on his state visit to Tanzania used it as a chance to buy illegal ivory.

‘You know when President of China, Hu Jintao, was coming to Tanzania… remember? They come to take many things here…’ I was surprised and asked, ‘When Hu Jintao visited here, they went away with a lot of ivory?’

‘Yeah,’ said Daudi. ‘But that was not for Hu Jintao, it was the whole group. He didn’t have a chance to visit. Then they go direct to the airport because VIP, no one checks your bags, you just carry.’ Daudi claimed it was a profitable day.

I asked, ‘How much did you charge?’

‘$1,000 for one tusk.’

Daudi was warming to me. He appeared to think we might be big buyers. He now made us a truly amazing offer.

I asked him, ‘How many kilos can you get?

‘As many as you want,’ Daudi said. ‘Even if you say 1,000 kilos.’

Daudi said he had ‘many friends’ and he just needed to phone round the villages on the margins of Tanzania’s game parks and reserves. It would take a month.

We made our excuses and left. We did not want to fuel ivory poaching. But there are plenty of other buyers across Africa and I wondered what hope there is if buying a tonne of ivory is so easy.

Aidan Hartley covers the new ivory war in Channel 4’s Unreported World: End of the Elephant? at 7.35 p.m. on Friday 26 March.