Northstar

www.travelweekly-asia.com 10 | ITB ASIA Official Dailies Q: when poachers slaughter a rhino, what is the trail that eventually sees the horn arrive in asia? Beverly Joubert: Poachers quickly remove the horns and head straight to cities where the trail often goes dead. Dogs often follow up from the THE RHINO WARS: TIME TO STOP THE SLAUGHTER By Ian Jarrett Dereck and Beverly Joubert are award-winning filmmakers from Botswana whose recent expansion into conservation tourism via their new company, Great Plains, is a venture into community/conservation partnerships in Africa. kill so confusing the scent trail is a tactic. Depending on the country, the poacher then sells to a local buyer, often a foreign national, and he/she will have contacts to bribe inside of customs. Major exit points are Mombasa (in Kenya) Mozambique, Durban and to some degree Johannesburg. The most common route is to Vietnam, where there is some stickiness but then the bulk goes to China. A lesser percentage leaves the ports and goes to Yemen and stays there for dagger handles etc. Q: how is it that smugglers can avoid detection on the rhino horns' illegal journey from the african bush to a Chinese medicine shop. BJ: There are a few known cartels working with rhino horn but anti poaching forces have had limited jurisdiction across police and customs borders so there has been a disconnect between wildlife enforcement and border controls. It has been said that to move one rhino horn takes at least one corrupt official. It's huge risk to smuggle a rhino horn unless you know there is some kind of 'ease of passage' to help. This of course happens on both sides, in Africa and all the way through Vietnam into China. Q: are airports unable to detect the shipments? what about customs and immigration? is bribery of officials a problem? BJ: Airports have not been very effective but again it is changing fast as the stakes go up. We are now losing a rhino every 7.5 hours, (20 a week) – more than 1,000 a year. Everyone is starting to pay attention now. Corruption is a vital component of any rhino horn trade. Q: Does rhino horn act as virility drug - or is that a myth? BJ: Many of the ancient medicines come from very visual and intellectually primitive thinking: there are direct visual associations: shark fins have a visual aspect - penis shaped to a degree, as does a rhino horn. So there is a myth that rhino horn will increase libido but it has absolutely no medicinal qualities. Nor is it a cure, as some believe, for cancer, fevers, asthma and headaches. Yang Lan - the Oprah of China - said it well in a tweet (to a few hundred million people): Real Men Don't Need Rhino Horn. Q: There is a debate about whether rhino hunting should be a controlled activity. Do you support this? PICTURE BY BEVERLY JOUBERT. Continued on page 11. great Plains is currently working to diversify south africa's rhino holdings by shipping 100 rhino on a cargo jet to Botswana, which is currently the safest place in the rhino's range, due to the low level of government corruption. 2014 will be the year when rhinos reached a tipping point, the year when rhinos are breeding at a rate lower than the kill rate of poaching. among celebrities helping to save the Rhino are Chinese-born actress Bai ling, who is spreading the conservation message via her two m social media followers in asia. Beverly Joubert points out that africa's poaching problem is largely driven by poverty and says each rhino that is killed steals revenue for someone in africa, who relies on that rhino and the tourist dollars it earns to feed his family. Complicating the debate is a move by south africa to consider the introduction of legal trade in rhino horn, arguing that flooding the market would reduce demand, – just as it did with ivory in 2008. south africa has an 18-tonne stockpile of rhino horn. Conservationists condemn this approach, insisting that the one-off sale of a large stockpile of ivory by southern african states to China and Japan in 2008 had the opposite effect, fuelling the demand for ivory and increasing elephant poaching levels. Figures show that the number of rhino poached in south africa has risen each year since 2007. last year, 1004 rhino were killed for their horns. Rhino horn can sell illegally on the black market for Us$60,000 a kilo. ian Jarrett talks to Dereck and Beverly Joubert about the rhino wars and why asia must play its part by refusing to deal in rhino horn, a commodity, Beverly Joubert says, that has zero effect on a man's libido, and can have serious health implications. responsiBle travel

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