Four Chinese immigrants walked away in late January from a Nairobi court after pleading guilty to possession of game trophies. What shocked most people was the combined fine of $1,200 they received for the poached ivory they had, which on the black market can easily fetch as much as $1,300 a pound.

Commentators were not amused by the sentence, arguing that if a local had been found with an illegal substance, such as drugs, in Asia they would have faced severe punishment, and possibly the death penalty. The argument goes that ivory is a national treasure and that anyone who would deliberately poach it should be prepared to face stiff penalties.

Think about it this way, if tourists flock every year from as far as New York and Beijing to come and see Kenya's Big Five of lions, elephants, leopards, buffaloes and rhinos and pay a handsome figure in high-end resorts, then anyone who would jeopardize this source of income ought to be punished.

Killing wildlife amounts to depriving Kenya of much needed jobs in the tourism sector. Unfortunately the law as it stands means that the killings will continue, and ivory and rhino horns will still find their way to the lucrative Chinese market.

Simply put, fines that are too weak give poachers no incentive to stop their wanton killing of wildlife.

Before looking at how Beijing can work with Nairobi, the first step would be enacting laws that make illegal hunting more punitive coupled with tough enforcement in Kenya and its neighbors.

The great annual migration in East Africa, where wildlife moves between Kenya and Tanzania, affords a perfect example on why laws need to be stiffened and harmonized. If laws are lax on one side of the border but stiff on the other, the result will just be an outsourcing of poaching to where criminals can go scot-free.

Fines for poaching in Tanzania are no better than those in Kenya. Poaching results in fines of between $500 and $1,000 which means that stiffening fines in Kenya alone would be futile.

Conservationists say that this is the first step that must be taken, and have also admitted that not much can be achieved in China if there are no radical reforms at the local level. Activists also say that in China an awareness campaign can be done to discourage ivory and rhino horns as gifts especially by the business fraternity.

The campaigns should be similar to those on blood diamonds, showing the havoc this is having on the African elephant.

Burning stockpiles would also go a long way as opposed to auctioning them.

John Gachiri, a journalist in Kenya