At the beginning of August, the minutes of a meeting of intelligence chiefs from African states were released, revealing the extent to which poaching and the smuggling of ivory and rhino horn were being used to fund insurgent groups in South Sudan, Al Shabaab in Somalia and the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). A separate report - published in the 19 August volume of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - estimated that poachers have killed 100,000 elephants in Africa in the last three years. The rate of killing has been in excess of 7% - even higher in Central Africa - while the average annual population increase is only 5%. This suggests a process of attrition that could lead to the extinction of the elephant, including in South Sudan. Ivory funds insurgency and militias The African intelligence meeting minutes, reported by South Africa's Mail and Guardian, said that poaching was a serious political/security problem as well as an environmental one and that there was "a great deal of evidence of fledgling linkages between poaching and wildlife trafficking...and transnational organised criminal activities, including terrorism and weapons proliferation". They said that they had information that groups from South Sudan were [...]
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