2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting to the team of journalists who had revealed the story of Trafigura and the Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump. The award went to the British journalists Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean from BBC "Newsnight" and David Leigh from "The Guardian", Synnove Bakke and Kjersti Knudsson from Norwegian TV, and Jeroen Trommelen from the Dutch paper "De Volkskrant". The citation says the award was for reports "which exposed how a powerful offshore oil trader tried to cover up the poisoning of 30,000 West Africans". The vessel (renamed "Gulf Jash") was initially heading to
History of Ivory Coast areas northward from the West African coast. Ivory Coast, like the rest of West Africa, was subject to these influences, but the absence of sheltered harbors along its coastline prevented Europeans from establishing permanent trading posts. Seaborne trade, therefore, was irregular and played only a minor role in the penetration and eventual conquest by Europeans of Ivory Coast. The slave trade, in particular, had little effect on the peoples of Ivory Coast. A profitable trade in ivory, which gave the area its name, was carried out during the seventeenth century, but it brought about such a decline in elephants that