Resumen de Ivory feeds Africa's wars
Schiffman reports how war and ivory are deeply linked. At the headquarters of the Mara Elephant Project, Marc Goss contemplates a jumble of squiggly lines superimposed on a Google Earth map. Each line represents the recent movements of a GPS-collared elephant in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. An unsustainable four elephants are killed in Africa every hour for the ivory in their tusks. But while impoverished locals are enlisted to pull the triggers, its highly organized transnational crime syndicates and militias that run the poaching and reap the lion's share of the profits, fueling terrorism and increasingly war. That's the conclusion of a joint report by the conservation group Born Free USA and C4ADS, a non-profit organization that conducts data-driven analysis of security and conflict issues.
