Cracking down on illegal ivory trade: Tusks from more than 300 elephants hidden inside wooden logs on the Sudan-Uganda border are seized thanks to British scanner technolog

The scale of the industrial slaughter of elephants for their tusks was laid bare after officals seized 750 ivory tusks hidden in treetrunks worth £6.5million.

A scanner funded by Britain is being used to scan shipping containers being carried by road through Africa.

Around 325 elephants would have been slaughtered to provide the ivory found in the containers.

As well as ivory, scales removed from endangered pangolins were also found on the shipment.

Two Vietnamese men who were transporting the illegal goods were arrested.

The scanners were provided by the Department for International Development to the Ugandan Revenue Authority.

The illegal wildlife goods were seized in a town called Elegu, in northern Uganda, on the border with South Sudan on January 31.

Ugandan customs officers suspect the goods originated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and were then smuggled via South Sudan into Uganda.

The scanners are called non-intrusive cargo inspection scanners, which act like x-rays and mean that customs officers don’t physically have to open up the lorries to search inside.

They can scan through the metal cargo containers.

Aside from tackling illegal wildlife goods the scanners can also help stop other illicit items from crossing borders, such as drugs and illegal immigrants.

They can scan up to 200 trucks per hour meaning each scan takes about three minutes per truck.

Despite a ban on trade in ivory, poaching of African elephants is still rampant.

China is the biggest market for the tusks.

There are an estimated 415,000 elephants remaining on the continent, compared with as many as five million in the early part of the 20th century, according to the WWF.

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Drones to combat wildlife poachers in Malawi

China’s ambassador to Malawi have gifted the country two drones tasked with fighting poachers who are threatening the survival of the African nation’s rapidly declining wildlife.

The Chinese ambassador was quoted in the Nyasa Times saying: “This is the technology that has helped us in the monitoring of our wildlife, this will help Malawi in dealing with poaching.”

Drones have an inherent advantage over human rangers in monitoring wildlife in that they can cover a lot more ground in a shorter period of time. New software have been developed that enable the drones to identify poachers from high in the sky and track the movements of groups of wildlife.

In other African nations battling poaching, the simple addition of drone patrols at nights that shine their lights at would-be poachers have caused many of them to give up and run away.

The main animals with populations considered under threat in Malawi are elephants, rhinos and lions. The problem has gotten so serious that Malawi have started importing animals from South Africa including 500 elephants and other ‘big five’ animals to maintain the country’s tourism industry.

In 2016, the World Bank produced a report showing Malawi had one of lowest per person incomes in the world with average citizen taking home less than US$1,045 per year. Against this backdrop, poaching can be an attractive option for some Malawians who stand to make comparatively enormous sums from dealing in illegal wildlife goods. In Kenya, terrorist group Al Shabab are reported to earn between $200,000 and $600,000 USD per month from the illegal ivory trade.

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