Ivory sold openly in Saudi Mövenpick hotel

This video is called Where have all the Elephants gone? – Africa.

Another video, which used to be on YouTube, was called Elephant poaching – Ivory being sold openly inside Movenpick hotel building.

Note: in the video title, and in the Wildlife Extra article quoted in this blog post, the hotel corporation’s name is not spelled consistently. It is Mövenpick, a daughter corporation of the Nestlé corporation.

From Wildlife Extra:

Ivory being sold openly inside Moevenpick hotel

Ivory being sold openly in Saudi hotel

November 2013. With wild elephants being driven towards extinction by the scourge of poaching, Möevenpick Hotels are feeding, and possibly creating, the demand for ivory by renting shops inside their hotels to ivory traders, and thus profiting from the ivory trade.

Promotion for this shop involves leaving booklets in each hotel room promoting the shop.

Our reader took a video of this shop inside the Möevenpick Hotel in Madinah in Saudi Arabia in October 2013 (see above).

By promoting ivory sales and creating demand for ivory products, Möevenpick hotels are encouraging the poaching of elephants. By displaying ivory openly for sale in their hotels, they are marketing ivory to people who may not have previously thought of buying any.

This has a terrible human cost, as well as threatening the existence of elephants. As many as 13,000 people have lost their lives protecting wildlife in the last eight years around the world, and it is estimated that up to 50,000 elephants are killed by poachers every year. 6 tonnes of ivory have been seized by authorities in East Africa in the last few weeks, and seizures only represent a small percentage of the ivory that is exported every year.

Sustainability policy or lip service?

Möevenpick Hotels own sustainability policy states “For Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts sustainability is about meeting current needs while at the same time preserving and contributing to the future for generations to come.

Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts is convinced that the combination of its values and global approach to sustainability will help the company to be recognized as one of the world’s most trusted hotel management companies.”

Like many large organisations, it appears that Moevenpick pay lip service to ‘sustainability’ whilst the reality is that if someone wants to pay them some rent for a shop, then the need for cash overcomes “preserving and contributing to the future for generations to come.”

If elephants are to survive [then] demand for ivory needs to be stopped.

November 2013: Despite unprecedented levels of illegal ivory trade globally, there are positive signs that ivory markets in Cambodia and Singapore may be showing signs of decline, according to a piece in TRAFFIC Bulletin, the only journal devoted exclusively to wildlife trade issues: here.

Striking Nestlé Worker Shot Dead in Colombia: here.

Nestlé trying to patent the fennel flower: here.

Related articles

• Profiteering ivory (michaeleltonmcleod.com)
• Elephant Poaching and the Illegal Ivory Trade (wnyc.org)
• Toure joins fight against poaching (bbc.co.uk)
• A Fight Against Poaching (abalatela.wordpress.com)
• Elephants face extinction, football star Yaya Toure warns (modernghana.com)
• Elephant Crisis: An International March, As Warning and Call to Action (newswatch.nationalgeographic.com)
• Empower locals who conserve wildlife, says First Lady (capitalfm.co.ke)
• The President of Tanzania Needs to Crack Down on Elephant Poaching… (sotinpc.wordpress.com)