Anyone know if it is legal to sell legally taken ivory?


PUTIAN, China - Carefully, the Chinese ivory dealer pulled out an elephant tusk cloaked in bubble wrap and hidden in a bag of flour. Its price: $17,000.

"Do you have any idea how many years I could get locked away in prison for having this?" said the dealer, a short man in his 40s, who gave his name as Chen.

A surge in demand for ivory in Asia is fuelling an illicit trade in elephant tusks, especially from Africa. Over the past eight years, the price of ivory has gone up from about $100 per kilogram ($100 per 2.2 pounds) to $1,800, creating a lucrative black market.



Experts warn that if the trade is not stopped, elephant populations could dramatically plummet. The elephants could be nearly extinct by 2020, some activists say. Sierra Leone lost its last elephants in December, and Senegal has fewer than 10 left.

"If we don't get the illegal trade under control soon, elephants could be wiped out over much of Africa, making recovery next to impossible," said Samuel K. Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington. "The impact that loss of this keystone species would have on African ecosystems is difficult to even imagine."

Wasser estimated that the illegal trade is about 100 times the legal trade, with a value of $264 million over the past decade.

Demand for ivory runs strong in the Chinese city of Putian, which sits directly across from Taiwan, its outskirts crowded with factories owned by Taiwanese businessmen. These businessmen have a reputation for collecting ivory, a sure way to seal a deal with an important client.

Chen buys his ivory from middlemen. He said he doesn't know its source.

"You don't ask these questions," he said.

At the source
Deep within the forests and parks of Africa, the source of ivory to China is clear.

In Kenya alone, poaching deaths spiked seven-fold in the last three years, culminating in 271 elephant killings last year. The Tsavo National Park area had 50,000 elephants in the 1960s; today, it has 11,000. And at least 10 Chinese nationals have been arrested at Kenya's airport trying to transport ivory back to Asia since the beginning of last year.

The Kalashnikov assault rifles slung around the shoulders of Kenyan park rangers are not for animals, but for poachers. It is a dangerous game for both sides: A ranger was killed in a shootout on Christmas Day, and a poacher in a shootout in February.

Poachers use guns, rusty metal snares and poison arrows. It's the poison arrows that worry the rangers because they belong to local Kenyan tribesmen. The pastoral tribes that once protected Kenya's elephants are increasingly becoming their killers.

"Now the trend is different, because they know they can make quick money out of these trophies. They sell it to the poachers," said Yussuf Adan, the senior warden in Tsavo East. Such a sale can net a tribesman hundreds or even thousands of dollars, a life-changing amount.

Last month, ranger Mohamed Kamanya had to cut the tusks out of an elephant killed by a poacher's poisoned arrow. Kamanya says it's like a human death.

"Economic interests have surpassed ecological interests," he said. "I think we're in for a serious problem."

Impact of poaching
The number of elephants in Africa has dropped by more than 600,000 in the last 40 years, mostly due to poaching.

A global ban on the ivory trade in 1989 briefly halted their demise. But the ban's initial success has been undermined by a booming demand for ivory among Asian consumers, a decline in law enforcement budgets and a thriving black market that takes advantage of rampant corruption in many African countries.

Conservationists said poaching has steadily worsened since 2004 and now leads to the loss of as many as 60,000 elephants each year. Compounding the problem has been the hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers who have migrated to Africa. Some buy up ivory in largely unregulated shops and join the criminal syndicates that smuggle the tusks back to Asia.


In this image made from video released by wildlife photographer Karl Amman, poachers skin a forest elephant for its meat and tusks in the Bangui forest, Central African Republic, on May 3, 2007.


"What we found is that the illicit trade in ivory continues to increase and that it is increasing at a much more rapid rate than previously was the case," said Tom Milliken, regional director for Traffic East Southern Africa, which analyzes ivory seizures.

Hidden in containers of mundane consumer products like cell phone parts, ivory is transported through as many as a half dozen countries between Africa and Asia to avoid detection. Shipping documents are forged, and the Asian gangs who control the trade often bribe customs officials to smooth the journey.

The gangs' deep pockets have allowed them to smuggle much bigger shipments — often several tons at a time worth millions of dollars, said Milliken.

Gangs are moving into the ivory trade because it is among the most lucrative enterprises, said Wasser.

"You can move huge amounts of contraband with low likelihood of getting caught," said Wasser, noting that less than 1 percent of all containers are even searched. "The prosecutions are extremely low and fines even lower. That makes this high-profit, low-risk enterprise, which is conducive to the involvement of organized crime."

Civil war
Peter Younger, who manages a project that targets sub-Saharan Africa for the international law enforcement agency Interpol, said gangs also benefit from the fact that elephants are often living in countries like Somalia or the Democratic Republic of Congo, where law enforcement is nonexistent or preoccupied with keeping civil order.

"It's easy to say to, for example, that Congo, you should do more to protect elephants, when they are doing everything to stop civil war," he said.

The primary destinations for illegal ivory have traditionally been Thailand, Japan and China, which have thriving black markets and some of the world's best ivory carvers. Thailand had three seizures last year and already had its biggest yet in February, when 2 tons of African tusks worth $3.6 million were found in containers bound for Laos.

But these countries are not alone. Over the past decade, half of the largest ivory seizures took place in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam, indicating they are also becoming key transit points, according to an October 2009 report by the Elephant Trade Information System.

Yes I do. Any elephant parts collected legally or illegally after the ivory ban are not legal for trade. Ocasionaly you will see pre bann ivory for sale for knife scales, custom pens, ect, ect. You almost were the last of the ivory hunters!!!

Brett

The CITES parties need to:

1. Encourage countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa to flood the market with the ivory they have stockpiled. The price of ivory would drop overnight, and so would poaching.

2. Tell Kenya and all "non-consumptive-use" NGOs to go to hell.

Bill Quimby

quote:

Originally posted by billrquimby:
The CITES parties need to:

1. Encourage countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa to flood the market with the ivory they have stockpiled. The price of ivory would drop overnight, and so would poaching.

2. Tell Kenya and all "non-consumptive-use" NGOs to go to hell.

Bill Quimby

Ain't that the truth!

BTW, the price of pre-ban ivory advertised for sale in the US, with proper paperwork, etc, is peanuts. The last time there was a thread on the sale/baning of sale of stockpiled ivory I checked, just for kicks. You can buy tusks for a whole lot less than it cost to go shoot them.

I think the numbers quoted in the article are far fetched BS.

JPK

quote:

Encourage countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa to flood the market with the ivory they have stockpiled. The price of ivory would drop overnight, and so would poaching.

Food for thought: If these countries sold their alleged "stockpiles"...Reckon those stockpiles my mysterously get replinished????

I think it's better to keep it there, burn it at regular intervals and do it in a very public way. That sends a messgae to anybody involved / wanting to be involved in the illicit trading of ivory that no matter what, there will be no legalized sale of ivory hereforward.

Thoughts?

JW

quote:

Originally posted by JPK:

quote:

Originally posted by billrquimby:
The CITES parties need to:

1. Encourage countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa to flood the market with the ivory they have stockpiled. The price of ivory would drop overnight, and so would poaching.

2. Tell Kenya and all "non-consumptive-use" NGOs to go to hell.

Bill Quimby

Ain't that the truth!

BTW, the price of pre-ban ivory advertised for sale in the US, with proper paperwork, etc, is peanuts. The last time there was a thread on the sale/baning of sale of stockpiled ivory I checked, just for kicks. You can buy tusks for a whole lot less than it cost to go shoot them.

I think the numbers quoted in the article are far fetched BS.

JPK

Couldn't agree more, the numbers are absolute crap.

Those stockpiles come from a variety of sources, including natural deaths of elephants and ivory confiscated from poachers. Granted, some of it gets into the illegal market, but destroying ivory would only reduce supply and bring higher prices, and result in increased poaching. That's exactly what happened after Kenya's much-publicized bonfire years ago.

Bill Quimby

I remember seeing that bonfire on the news and thought how pointless and idiotic it was ,only a animal rights fanatic would conceive of something so stupid ,never saved one elephant ,not one

The envy of Kenya toward those countries that weren't so stupid and saved and warehoused their ivory is the real reason Kenya resists and oposes the lawful occasional sale of stockpiled legal ivory.

Selling off legal, stockpiled ivory would drop prices, that is an inescapable fact of supply and demand. Remove a good portion of the profit and you remove a good portion of the motive behind poaching for ivory.

As far as resupply, elephants die of old age or other natural causes every year, non-export elephants, crop raiders, problem animals are shot every year. Allow the regular sale. maybe even annual sale and keep legal ivory prices low....

JPK

Yes, a big part of the solution is selling the legal ivory stockpiles, especially if the sales receipts are dedicated to Elephant anti-poaching and protection.

quote:

Originally posted by LionHunter:
Yes, a big part of the solution is selling the legal ivory stockpiles, especially if the sales receipts are dedicated to Elephant anti-poaching and protection.

"Yes, a big part of the solution is selling the legal ivory stockpiles, especially if the sales receipts are dedicated to Elephant anti-poaching and protection."

========

A larger part would be to reduce Kenya's undue influence over CITES somehow.

It's only one country among many with elephant populations, and it should be obvious to all that its policies are directed by well-heeled groups opposed to any "consumptive" use of Africa's wildlife resources.

It is beyond comprehension why the CITES parties have not acknowledged that Kenya's experiment in protecting large wildlife is a failure, especially with all the success stories in sustainable wildlife management across southern Africa.

Bill Quimby

quote:

Originally posted by tankhunter:
I remember seeing that bonfire on the news and thought how pointless and idiotic it was ,only a animal rights fanatic would conceive of something so stupid ,never saved one elephant ,not one

You aren't looking at the big picture, it wasn't pointless or idiotic. It "proved" to the world that Kenya was "darn serious" about protecting its elephant.

Meanwhile it ensured that prices would rise which would put more money into the hands of the politicians who controlled poaching in Kenya. And Kenya would be under less scrutiny therefore the poachers/politicians in less danger.

And what the hell did the ruling elites care about the stockpiled ivory? It wasn't like they would get to put the money into their own bank accounts if they sold it. So the burned it.