Special Report: Why Africa Is Losing Its Vultures
30th Jan. 2016
AFRICA is losing its vultures. Of its 11 species of the bird, 6 are at risk of extinction and 4 are critically endangered, according to a recent report by BirdLife International, a nature conservation partnership. The vulture population in much of the rest of the world is at risk, too. Catherine Bearder, the last Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament, has been petitioning for the European Union to save the world’s vultures and eagles; the UN, too, has been discussing what action to take. Why are vultures vanishing, and why should we care?
Since the 1990s, the population of South Asia’s vulture species has collapsed by more than 99%. In 2003 scientists identified diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug used to treat livestock, as the main cause for this decline. Vultures living on the carcasses of animals recently treated with the drug died from severe kidney failure within weeks of ingesting it. This created two main problems. The first is connected to vultures’ place in the ecosystem. As their numbers declined, a host of other disease-ridden animals—in particular rabied dogs—came to feed off the carcasses instead. And there was another problem. India’s community of Parsees, who do not cremate nor bury their dead, but rather lay them out on towers known as dokhmas for vultures to eat, found that this tradition was imperilled. In 2006 the governments of India, Pakistan and Nepal introduced a ban on the manufacture of the drug that has since seen vulture numbers in the region stabilise, though they remain vulnerable.
But diclofenac remains widely available across Africa, and loopholes in European law mean it is approved for commercial sale in five European countries, including Spain and Italy, where 90% of European vultures live. In Africa, poachers use the drug to deliberately target vultures. Authorities often use the presence of the birds circling in the sky as an indicator that illegally killed big game carcasses are nearby. To eliminate their informers and to prevent prosecution, poachers therefore lace the animal corpse with the drug. In 2013 an elephant carcass in Namibia, Africa, was surrounded by up to 600 dead vultures. Another danger is the demand for vulture body parts for traditional medicine in certain parts of Africa. Rapid urbanisation has also served to displace vultures’ natural habitats.
In October 2015, UN representatives met in Trondheim, Norway, where they agreed to add 12 species of vulture to the list of threatened species under the Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation of Migratory Birds of Prey, one of the instruments concluded under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. As one of the last major strongholds for the Egyptian vulture, Iran recently announced its decision to completely ban the use of diclofenac. In December, the European Medicines Agency confirmed that the residues of diclofenac found in animal carcasses put vultures in the European Union at risk. As Europe awaits the Commission’s decision on how best to deal with this threat, Africa would do well to take note.
Correction: It was in fact the threatened species under the Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation of Migratory Birds of Prey (not, as the original correction had it, the list of threatened migratory species under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals). This has been updated.
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