Cape Town - More than 800 rhinos have been poached in South Africa in the last three years.
This came to light in a parliamentary response from Forestry, Fisheries and Environment Minister Barbara Creecy to a question by EFF MP Andrew Arnolds.
Arnolds wanted to know how many rhinos and elephants were poached in 2020/21 and 2021/22 and what interventions the government had put in place to curb poaching.
According to Creecy in 2020/21, 404 rhinos had been poached while in 2021/22, 469 rhinos were poached.
Twenty-five elephants were poached between 2020 and 2022.
“During 2020, seven Integrated Wildlife Zones were introduced across South Africa to facilitate better co-ordination in order to enhance the protection of the country’s rhino population.
“Over the last year conservation and anti-poaching efforts have intensified countrywide, as a joint effort is made by the collaborative initiatives of State-owned conservation areas, government and private landowners,” the minister said.
This included making use of real time insights and analytical capability, linking, for example, camera traps and ranger patrols while integrating a range of other systems.
“The Environmental Enforcement Fusion Centre within the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment continues to support the teams at both tactical level and strategic level.
“Our analytical capabilities have also improved, resulting in the increased capacity to identify those involved in the illegal killing and trafficking of our wildlife as well as improved and expanded investigations by multi-disciplinary teams.
“This work further strengthens the essential collaboration with the SAPS, the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, the Department of Justice, and other sectors of the security forces to gather, analyse and share intelligence on wildlife trafficking so that the international syndicate related crimes can be effectively dealt with.”
According to the “Rhino horn trafficking as a form of transnational organised crime 2012-2021” report, a global threat assessment by the Wildlife Justice Commission and World Wide Fund for Nature found more than 7.5 tonnes of rhino horns were seized from illegal trade globally in the past 10 years.
South Africa was linked to half of all rhino horns seized globally over the past 10 years, and Vietnam to just over one quarter.
Cape Times