Word: trailing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Between Africa, littered with the bloated carcasses of elephants, and the huge stockpiles of the Far East is a trail marked by secrecy and deceit. It is a trail traveled by ruthless poachers, cunning smugglers, corrupt and inept officials, and the barons of the trade: a handful of men who have never seen an elephant in the wild. They and their wealthy customers do not understand -- or choose not to -- the high cost of this trade. They do not see the herds mowed down by automatic assault rifles, the tusks frantically hacked from the skulls and the orphaned and wounded...
...ivory trail leading out of Africa varies according to the latest regulation and the current loophole. In recent years ivory has been smuggled aboard every mode of transportation, from commercial jetliners to the single- masted dhows that ply the ancient sea routes of the Indian Ocean...
Until now, the ivory trail has flourished under the less than watchful eye of the CITES secretariat. In 1985 when the organization announced its plan to register all tusks as part of an ivory-control system, conservationists hoped the illegal trade would be curbed. But the deals that CITES officials struck with Singapore, Burundi and other nations, under which undocumented ivory could be registered, moved a mountain of ill-gotten ivory into the marketplace...
...world's affection for ivory is almost as ancient and as great. Today the voracious appetite for the tusks of African elephants -- particularly in the Far East -- threatens to eradicate this noble species. TIME correspondent Ted Gup chronicles the danger in this week's cover story on the ivory trail...
...investigative reporter who covered the Iran-contra and Pentagon procurement scandals, Gup logged 35,000 miles in ten weeks traveling around the globe. He began toward the end of the ivory trail, in Tokyo and Hong Kong, where more than 400 tons of ivory were imported last year. Visiting warehouses where tusks were stacked to the ceiling, "I got to see the ivory the way the Far East sees ivory -- divorced from the animal and remote from the killing," Gup says. "Most of the consumers are so far from the source that they cannot imagine its origin in axes...