Kenya's president has set fire to more than five tonnes of elephant ivory worth £10m to draw attention to poaching deaths.
Mwai Kibaki was almost burned as he lit the mound of 335 ivory tusks and 41,000 trinkets, which had been confiscated in Singapore.
"Through the disposal of contraband ivory, we seek to formally demonstrate to the world our determination to eliminate all forms of illegal trade in ivory," Kibaki told several hundred people at a rural Kenya Wildlife Service training facility. "We must all appreciate the negative effects of illegal trade to our national economies. We cannot afford to sit back and allow criminal networks to destroy our common future."
Kenyan officials first set fire to a mound of ivory in 1989, a desperate call-to-action to alert the world to a poaching crisis that sent Africa's elephant populations plummeting. Elephant numbers are much healthier today, but activists say that another second elephant crisis is coming as China's middle class seeks to satisfy its appetite for ivory.
The group Save the Elephants tracks elephant news from around the world, and cited newspaper headlines from last week that documented elephant-related busts in Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
The group's founder, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, said he hoped people would see Kenya's latest ivory burn as another warning that elephants are again being hunted. He said the economic loss from the ivory burning was part of the message.
"This is a clear signal that it's worth a lot more money than you could get on the market. We have to stop the buying if we want to stop the killing," he said as the ivory burned nearby. "I'm not totally pessimistic. I think the Chinese can be converted."
A global ban on the ivory trade in 1989 briefly halted the elephants' demise. But the ban's initial success has been undermined by Asia's booming demand and increasing human-elephant conflicts as people encroach on the animals' land.
Africa has about 500,000 elephants, down from 1.3 million in the 1970s. Kenya has 37,000 elephants, up from the 16,000 it had at the height of the crisis in 1989 but far below the country's peak.
Wednesday's burning, though hosted by Kenya, was carried out by the Lusaka Agreement Task Force, a group of seven African countries that work to protect flora and fauna. A member of the group, Ephraim Kamuntu, Uganda's minister of tourism, said it sent the signal that "the days of poachers are numbered".
The burned ivory was confiscated by officials in Singapore in 2002. It was then sent to Kenya, where DNA analysis determined that the tusks originated in Zambia and Malawi.