Japan and China putting Africa's elephants at risk

A report in the Washington Post tells of how Africa's elephants are now endangered because the international effort to control the ivory trade has collapsed. The market for the ivory is Japan and China. Scientists studying the problem report:

. . . an aggressive, well-funded anti-poaching program could be highly effective now because DNA testing can pinpoint where the animals are being killed. The report also said that an education program in East Asia is essential to curb the demand for ivory.

"I don't think people in China and Japan fully understand the crisis that their ivory purchases have caused," Wasser said. He proposed something like a current Chinese campaign against shark-fin soup, in which a popular basketball player asks, "What's wrong with us that we kill the sharks for the fin?"

Japan, one of the richest nations on earth, has absolutely no excuse for engaging in this kind of barbaric trade. It gets worse, at the last meeting on the ivory trade,

in October 2006, a CITES committee authorized Japan provisionally but deferred a decision on China. At that meeting, however, Japan failed to report 2.8 tons of illegal ivory it had seized several months before, showing, some officials said, that smuggling remains a problem.

Disgraceful.