News that four West African countries, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, and Senegal want the upcoming meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to essentially bar Botswana and its neighbours from exporting elephant products, has been met with bewilderment by Batswana.

CITES is an international body binding 183 states to agreements on the trade and protection of endangered plants and animals. The upcoming Conference of Parties (CoP), to be held in Panama in November, is CITES’ highest decision-making meeting held every three years where countries frequently clash over proposals to tighten or loosen trade in various animals and plants.

The four countries, joined by Syria, have proposed that elephants in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe be moved from their Appendix II listing to Appendix I, the highest level category reserved for species on the brink of extinction.

At present, CITES recognises a ‘split-listing’ for African elephants. The species in Botswana and its neighbours are known as the savanna elephant and it is accepted that its population is not only very large, but stable in growth, while in West Africa, numbers of the forest elephant species are small and declining, under pressure from poachers and poor conservation.

In Panama, Zimbabwe, supported by her neighbours, has proposed a once-off ivory sale of government-owned stockpiles with the restriction that the funds are used for conservation initiatives. The last such sale took place in 2008.

Botswana meanwhile has joined Namibia in proposing that that country be allowed a level of trade in rhino horn. Under the din of the local outrage is the lesser-known fact that the latest attempt by the four West African countries is not the first time they have attempted the move. At the last CoP, held in 2019 in Geneva, the same countries were part of a larger group of eight which again moved the same proposal to upgrade the listing of Southern African elephants.