[ad_1]
In a deep underground cave, somewhere in South Africa, there is a well-kept collection of rhinoceros horns, each of which has been weighed, measured, photographed and tagged with a microchip, and its DNA has been sampled, decoded and registered in a database. Together, the horns – legally harvested from rhinos raised in private land – weigh 108 kilograms. "In terms of undervalued resources, it's madness," says Alexander Wilcocks, director of Cornu Logistics, the company that owns the escort.
Wilcocks refers to the fact that illegally traded rhino horn – used to make jewelry, or sold as a "medicine" without any significant proven effect – is currently one of the most valuable products on the planet, up to $ 125 per gram on the black markets dell & # 39; Asia.
The international trade of rhino horn has been banned for decades. But this did not stop Wilcocks and his partners, supported by the South Africans who raise and protect the rhinos on their land, to devise a scheme that could yield its investors huge profits if one day international trade were legalized. They have launched a new digital currency called Rhino Coin, through which almost anyone can own a part of the horn in the Cornu vault for about $ 4 a gram – a small fraction of the value of the black market.
South Africa has by far the largest rhinos population in the world, with an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 black and white rhinos. But the poachers kill more than 1,000 rhinos from the year 2013, and many of the 330 private rhinos owners in the country – caring for more than 7,000 rhinos – say they are ruining by paying for security for keep heavily armed poaching unions from slaughtering their animals by their horns. Selling Rhino Coin – a virtual currency somehow like Bitcoin, but backed by a rhino horn – Wilcocks says his company can raise capital for rhinos protection. It's "cryptocurrency with a conscience," he says.
"We desperately need a flow of income to pay for the conservation of these animals," says a spokesman for rhinestone farmers.
"Private reserves have spent well over 2 billion Rand (about 140 million dollars) from 2009 to the end of 2017 to protect their animals," says Pelham Jones, president of Rhino's own private association. "We desperately need a flow of income to pay for the conservation of these animals, especially when we put it in the context that we now own about 50 percent of the national herd."
Rhino Coin is on the edge of a debate that has raged for years on the legalization of the rhino horn trade, a debate sharpened by continuous and intense poaching. The international sale of rhino horn has been banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) since 1977 and domestic trade in most Asian countries, including the major markets of China and Vietnam, has long been illegal.
Most of the world's conservation and animal welfare organizations are severely tested by the legalization of trade, believing that it could drastically worsen poaching by generating an uncontrollable demand from honking consumers. Conservationists say that the pool of potential Chinese buyers is so large that they take legal action faster than they could ever be reinstated, encouraging poachers to fill the deficit. And experts say that because poisoned horn products are difficult to distinguish from horn-based products harvested legally and marketed in South Africa, an international legal business could create conduits for poached horn to find their way for the market.
A vet examines a rhinoceros recently locked up in John Hume's ranch near Klerksdorp, South Africa. Hume has more than 1,600 rhinos, which are decanted to deter poachers.
MUJAHID SAFODIEN / AFP / Getty Images
South Africa, unusual among African countries, has a large private sector of breeding wild animals. The ranch is a loose term: some breeders manage what can only be described as rhinos feed, where they confine dozens of rhinos in a single enclosure and feed them every day. John Hume, the world's largest rhinos owner with a herd of over 1,600 animals, retains many of his animals. Hume has heavily supported the initiative of Rhino Coin and is the leading car horn contributor to the system.
Other breeders keep rhinos that are actually wild, which sprawl over large areas and feed on their own. Almost all ranches need security forces to repel the poachers, who wield ever more powerful weapons and even improvised explosive devices. Deadly gunfights are common. Public and private reserves deploy rangers with automatic rifles and grenade launchers, miles of deadly electric fencing, light aircraft and helicopters, as well as radar, cameras and military-grade listening instruments. This has reduced poaching in some reserves. It is also extremely expensive, so efforts to raise money through the sale of rhino horn.
South Africa posed a moratorium on internal rhino horn trade in 2009 because government agencies discovered it was used as a cover to sell poached horns to international criminal syndicates. Despite the opposition of conservation groups, owners of well-equipped South African private pigs pushed for the re-legalization of trade, and last year won a case in the South African Constitutional Court and canceled the 2009 moratorium .
The government has now built somewhat cumbersome systems that can support domestic trade, such as a DNA trumpet register, a national database and a system of permits under which registered buyers and sellers can legally trade in South Africa while the state holds the ownership of each one under control. (Approximately 860 horns were traded internally this year, according to the Department of Environmental Affairs.)
It has become common for reserves and ranches to rhinoceros of horns to reduce the value of animals to poachers.
Rhino Coin was launched at the beginning of this year to simplify the legal trading process and to create a revenue stream for rhino owners and rhino conservation in general. "Our concept was that it would be like the gold standard," says Wilcocks. But his plan uses cryptocurrency traded on the Internet instead of paper dollars, and rhino horn instead of gold. Most of Rhino's currency buyers are speculators, betting that the international ban on rhino horns will die out one day, and that the horn can then be sold at an incredible rise in Asia.
With the Rhino coin scheme, a horn owner inserts the horn into the Rhino coin system by selling it to Cornu Logistics legally. The horn is weighed on the nearest gram, controlled and placed in Cornu's vault. A digital token – a Rhino coin – is created for every ounce of horn via blockchain technology, a means to create a distributed database of verifiable and corruption-resistant records. Rhino coins can be bought with South African Rands from domestic and international buyers and exchanged with the Cornuex exchange, where their prices vary according to supply and demand.
The owner of the horn receives 54% of Rhino coins and can hold those tokens or sell them in exchange for cash at any time. The rest of the coins are assigned to a conservation foundation, a children's home, and administrative costs, such as trumpet conservation.
Wilcocks says that all the 108 kilograms of horn in the Cornu vault are in circulation, but the trade volumes were low because they did not do any promotion recently. No currency has been redeemed for horn again. He says he plans to launch an advertising campaign in January to increase interest in Rhino Coin, and another 500 kilograms of trumpets are waiting to be verified to be added to the system.
It has become common for reserves and ranch to horn rhinoceroses to reduce the value of animals to poachers and allow the horns to be harvested. The rhinos are typically reassured with a dart by a vet and their horns come off painlessly with a small chain saw a few inches above the base. This can be repeated every two or three years while the horns grow back. Jones of the rhiner owners' association estimates that about 30 tons of horn are currently stocked in South Africa – about 10 tons of collective private ownership and 17 to 20 tons from national parks and other state reserves and held at government times.
Jones says the horn of this reserve, continually supplied by rhinos, could generate a staggering $ 65 billion (about $ 4.5 billion) over five years if legally sold in Asia. (More cautious estimates put the potential value of South Africa's stocks at over $ 1 billion).
Rhino horns are weighed and stored at John Hume's ranch in February 2016. Hume is the main contributor of the horn to the Rhino coin system.
MUJAHID SAFODIEN / AFP / Getty Images
Many rhinos keepers – including some government conservation agencies and most private rhinos owners in southern Africa – feel strongly that legal trade can further stimulate rhinos conservation and that Asian markets can be managed in such a way that the uncontrollable consumer demand does not lead to illegal poaching.
But conservation organizations often cite a 2008 legal sale of elephant ivory from Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe to China and Japan as a reason not to sell rhino horn. Like the rhino horn, the international trade in ivory had been banned for a long time, but in 2008 CITES allowed a strictly regulated "one-off sale". Although China has implemented sophisticated security measures to monitor and control the ivory from this sale, these have failed, says Colman O & # 39; Criodain, Wildlife Policy Officer for WWF International. Numerous non-accredited stores and ivory carving workshops have arisen to take advantage of the resumption of consumer demand and "there was a parallel unlawful market that they were unwilling or unable to control".
The poaching of elephants and the traffic of ivory soared to supply these illegal outlets; by 2011, at least 15,000 African elephants were killed each year. As a result of international pressure, China has repressed illegal trade and banned the national sale of ivory; the poaching rates of elephants have decreased.
Although Hume portrays himself as a conservative rhino lover, his motives have often been questioned. He owns tons of horn and could earn hundreds of millions of dollars if he sells it in Asia. In the past he sold rhinos to trophy hunters and sold the animals to two brothers, suspected of rhino poachers and horn traffickers, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting project.
Rhino's currency is not "truly mainstream conservation in any sense of the word", says an expert.
Some observers say that because buyers can buy tokens from anywhere, CITES could see Rhino Coin as a form of international trade in trumpets and try to bind it; after all, the text of the treaty regulates the wild species "and their derivatives". Tom Milliken of TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade research organization, says, "I do not have much to say about Rhino Coin but an attempt to get funding to support a private rhino breeder who is a rather controversial figure, but it is not mainstream conservation in any sense of the word, it will probably not show any traction in financial markets over time. "
O & # 39; Criodain of the WWF says he would not bet on the internationally traded rhino horn trade or in China because of the powerful global resistance. Rhino coin speculators may never make a profit, he says. He points out that on 30 October the Chinese government announced that it would abolish the ban on the use of rhino horn in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a possible first step in opening up trade. But he soon backed off under a storm of protests from conservation organizations, announcing on November 12 that "the detailed regulations for implementation" of the October legal amendment had been "postponed after the study" and the strict ban on the sale and use of the rhino horn remained in force. It is not clear whether the regulations to allow the use of TCM will ever be written.
Although deaths from rhinos seem to decline slightly in South Africa this year due to better anti-poaching measures, incursions recorded in reserves and attempts to poaching continue to increase because transnational criminal unions are still buying horns. Meanwhile, private and government stocks continue to grow, further increasing sales incentives.
