Shuidong town is home to a network of ivory trafficking syndicates whose reach extends to East and West Africa, including the elephant poaching hotspots of Tanzania and Mozambique.

One syndicate member told undercover investigators that Shuidong is the destination for a staggering 80 per cent of all poached ivory smuggled into China from Africa.

A new report, The Shuidong Connection: Exposing the global hub of the illegal ivory trade, by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is the culmination of almost three years of painstaking undercover work during which investigators infiltrated one of the leading syndicates. This involved tracking a shipment of more than two tonnes of tusks from northern Mozambique to Shuidong, providing unique insights into the workings of an active ivory smuggling gang.

EIA first encountered the Shuidong smugglers in September 2014 whilst investigating the catastrophic poaching of elephants in Tanzania. In Zanzibar, the main gateway for shipments of tusks flowing out of Tanzania, EIA met with a sea cucumber trader from Shuidong who revealed that a community of his compatriots in Zanzibar was behind the smuggling, with a single group sending out 20 shipments to China in just one year.

They form part of an international network of people from Shuidong supplying the booming Chinese market for sea cucumbers and so with their knowledge of working in Africa and supply routes to China, their presence in strategic coastal towns and their business cover, the Shuidong traders in East and West Africa were ideally positioned to move into the illegal ivory trade.

In April 2016, EIA investigators travelled to Mozambique to ground-truth rumours that ivory traffickers were switching their focus from Tanzania as a result of improved enforcement efforts and prosecutions. In the port town of Pemba, they encountered a group of three Chinese nationals who were conspicuous because of their unique dialect – they were all from Shuidong.

Posing as potential ivory traders and logistics specialists, the investigators gradually gained the trust of the syndicate partners; over the course of more than a year and through multiple meetings, they were able to piece together a detailed picture of the enormous scale and nature scale of the operations, which involves:

• engagement of trusted Africa-based fixers to consolidate shipments of poached ivory in secure locations

• key Chinese syndicate players travelling to Africa to inspect tusks for quality and, subsequently, to African ports to remotely observe loading onto vessels

• bribing key customs and border enforcement personnel as well as freight agents

• concealing tusks in innocuous-looking shipments of plastic pellets

• using historically secure smuggling routes dotted with accomplices at every stage, known as ‘owning the road’

• obscuring the origin of shipping containers of ivory by sending them to be reloaded in transit countries such as South Korea

• the ability to swiftly diversify into other illegal wildlife products such as pangolin scales, totoaba fish maw and rhino horn as demand and supplies varied

• continuously re-investing criminal profits into new ivory and other wildlife shipments.

Despite the Chinese Government’s laudable decision to close its domestic ivory market, leading to a fall in price for ivory tusks in the country, the smuggling group was still active as of late June 2017, extending its operations to West Africa to source lucrative tusks poached from forest elephants.    

Mary Rice, EIA Executive Director, says: “The Chinese Government’s decision to shut its domestic ivory market by the end of 2017 is an admirable response to mounting international pressure to end the industrial-scale slaughter of Africa’s elephants. 

“What EIA discovered in Shuidong, however, clearly shows transnational criminal networks are operating with near-total impunity. It is vital that enforcement agencies in Africa and China put these criminals out of business immediately.”

Julian Newman, EIA Campaigns Director, adds: “EIA has shared, in confidence, the detailed intelligence unearthed during the course of the Shuidong investigation with relevant Government departments and enforcement agencies and looks to them to use it. Action is needed to end this huge criminal enterprise which is devastating Africa’s elephant populations.”

www.eia-international.org

Something urged me up onto Dartmoor the other Sunday night. A combination of incredible weather, the fact I had nowhere to be on Monday morning, and a desire for an earthy, elemental withdrawal. I took a book but needn’t have bothered, because my 12 hours were filled with watching, waiting, listening (and not much sleep). 12 hours of hypnotic wonder and pure joy. The weather was warm and still, the night was quiet and grand. Only by opening my eyes and seeing a sky full of Milky Way above did I really believe I was sleeping in a bivvy bag on Dartmoor.

Stillness settled like a blanket. Daylight gave way to the gloaming, and then to night, like acts of a play. The main players emerged – the joyful trilling of a blackbird handing over to the slow wise call of an owl, the incessant purring of a nightjar, and even the squeaks and snorts of a hare (I learned afterwards that I’d heard hares calling when by chance, a radio programme about hares came on the next day).

I’d felt drawn to spending a night on Dartmoor, paradoxically to feel whole and like ‘me’ again, whilst also wanting to blur into Earth below and galaxy above. I was also simply seeking stillness and silence; it felt essential. A descending quiet followed the animal orchestra, and felt as refreshing as cool water on a hot day. I caught myself frequently grinning, full of joy. The night became a series of gifts – animal calls, sunset, smells, colours, stars and planets, silence and finally, sunrise.

Noise pollution

 But these spaces for stillness and silence, whether experienced individually or globally, feel increasingly rare. We hear – and experience – that the world is getting noisier, and perhaps nowhere shows this quite like the stark, white silence of the Arctic.

Here, as a recent TED talk explains, human activity and climate change is, amongst other things, increasing noise pollution. Melting sea ice is exposing swathes of water, creating a bigger surface for waves to bubble and crash on, and a bigger surface for oil searches, fishing boats, research vessels and tourism to cut through. The noise is harming the communication and navigation abilities of native whales, which use intricate and haunting sonic songs to connect over vast distances. Add to this the pressure from southern ocean species like Orca and blue whales that are heading north because of warming seas, and the environment is becoming busier, cacophonous. Ancient underwater creatures are becoming stressed and lost.

I wonder how noise in our own environment might be impacting our ability to communicate, and to navigate life? Traffic; TV; agendas; words; ‘news’; pictures; insistent pings of phones – we get so used to all this supposedly important noise, that when quiet comes it rings painfully in our ears, or worse, we come to fear and avoid the silences and the space. It becomes a tomblike hole that must be filled, for fear of what might be discovered if we look inside.

Protecting silence, globally and personally

In defending Arctic habitats and the creatures that call them home, solutions include getting ships to slow down, and restricting access in certain seasons and areas that are important to mating or feeding, so as to quiet the underwater soundscape. Of course, we need to stop runaway climate change, which would ultimately protect the Arctic and everywhere else, but I like the intention of a move that will simply make things quieter, protecting beauty and wild things for their own sake.

William Blake spoke of seeing: “…a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower“. On Dartmoor, I didn’t read a single word of the book I took with me because I was entranced by imagined stories of ancient granite rocks; by colours that were created for this place; by the luck of hearing a nightjar; and by seeing Jupiter step out against an indigo canvas, followed by a legion of stars. The ‘entertainment’ was slow, but addictive. I watched (what I think was) a kind of gorse plant produce foam; moorland that turned from gold to brown to purple to grey; I saw birds diving to catch midges and moths (I think they were nightjars again); and when it was dark I saw the silhouette of a big bird hovering above me – cue hairs standing on the back of neck. The wonder forced to me to pay attention, quiet my mind, and simply watch the small things – which really are the truly eternal, vast and wise things.

We must create and protect stillness and silence in our own lives, before – like the Arctic sea creatures – we too become disoriented, stressed and lost, thereby further stressing our planet, for what we do to ourselves we do to our planet, and vice versa. Quakers, contemplatives, Buddhists and others know this and practice, even revere, silence.

How can we seek more stillness in our lives than an hour of yoga (with instructors telling us what to do), or going running (with headphones in our ears)? These things are nourishing, but if possible, physically being still in a wild space – a woodland, a moor, a mountain, a cliff top — seems to accelerate the ability to get out of headspace and into bodyspace, and finally out into wildspace; the world beyond head and body. I think it is there that we find simultaneously the shape of ourselves, alongside an awareness of connection to everything else – where your thoughts become so quieted that you can’t tell where you end and the cosmos and everything in it begins.

My instinct and experience tells me that it is from here that we might hear the small and grand questions and solutions to personal and collective challenges. If the world is in a grain of sand, just imagine what might be in an Arctic ecosystem, a community, or a human being — if only we might bravely create the stillness and silence to meet it and hear it.

For a fascinating look at how silence is used and even revered in culture, art, faith and elsewhere, I highly recommend Graham Turner’s book,’The Power of Silence. To watch the TED Talk about noise pollution in the Arctic Ocean, , see here.

For guidance about where you can wild camp on Dartmoor, see the camping map here.

This Author

Elizabeth Wainwright is the Ecologist’s Nature Editor. She spends her time between Devon and London, and loves wild spaces. She also co-leads a global community development charity.

Twitter: @LizWainwright

www.ElizabethJayneWainwright.com 

“Do you try and win votes over the important issues (which means fighting the battle on basically unfavourable ground)? Or do you forget about winning voters over and concentrate on trying to convince them that the unimportant issues (on which they are already on your side) are really important? For a variety of reasons the Tory strategists eventually plumped for the second course. I believe they were right to so do.” 

The ‘Scapegoat’ is Europe

Immigration is in reality an unimportant issue. Immigrants make a “vital” contribution to the UK economy. And yet immigration dominated the Brexit campaign. Brexit in turn dominated the general election with Theresa May demanding a mandate for the negotiations with the rest of the European Union. 

The dog-whistle politics of the Tories and UKIP seemed to deafen swathes of the electorate to the important issues: the government’s responsibility for a moribund economy, chronic housing shortages, fatal cuts to public services, the sell-off of the NHS, and the crisis of climate change. 

The Tories convinced some British white working class voters that immigration was really important because it was an issue on which white politicians appeared to be on the same side. And everybody forgot about the Tory donors and their magic money tree. 

Crisis in Housing, Health, Employment 

It’s a very old trick. The quote above is from Lord Lawson, the chairman of the Vote Leave campaign. But it does not refer to the recent Brexit crisis. 

It’s Lawson’s contemporaneous analysis of the 1964 general election for the Financial Times. He humbly coined it “Lawson’s law of election campaigning” in his self-serving autobiography, The View from Number 11: Memoirs of a Radical Tory. 

The Tories convinced many that immigration was the problem. But May as home secretary failed to solve the ‘problem’ of immigration. This allowed the Brexiteers to present Brexit as the solution to immigration, and by implication the crisis in housing, health, employment.

Poisoned Air and Rivers

My investigation for openDemocracy suggests that immigration was only of marginal importance even to those who ran the Brexit campaign. They knew it would win votes.