Ivory Trade

[Klipspringer]

Prof. Wiersema’s talk is kind of explained simply as to why the free market approach is very risky

[Lisbeth]

Very convincing speech, but then I was already convinced

[Flutterby]

[Richprins]

I don't find this new nor convincing at all.

The lady contradicts herself by saying that consumers would prefer wild poached animal products, but then a bit later in her counter-internal trading argument says that the consumer will not be able to differentiate between wild or farmed shaved rhino horn.

Also, there is no solution to poaching given other than a total ban on trade, which would surely not impact poaching, by definition!?

[Lisbeth]

Foreigners arrested with ivory bracelets at Kenyan airport

2019-08-20 10:41 | AFP

A Spanish woman has become the second foreigner in a week to be arrested at Kenya's international airport for wearing an ivory bangle, the wildlife service said Monday.

Spaniard Maria Pich-Aguilera, 50, was arrested on Sunday evening and pleaded guilty, paying a fine of one million shillings ($9,800) for illegal possession of ivory.

The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said in a statement she was "arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport with an ivory bangle," while travelling from Nairobi to Tanzania's financial capital Dar es Salaam. She was allowed to leave for Tanzania after paying her fine.

Last week a Frenchwoman was arrested at the airport on her way from France to Mayotte for possession of an ivory bracelet. She pleaded guilty and also paid the one million shilling fine - the alternative is 12 months in prison.

"We noticed this new trend where ivory is smuggled through worked or processed bangles and we have increased surveillance," said an investigator speaking on condition of anonymity.

A KWS official, also asking not to be named, said that trafficking included "ornamentals made out of ivory".

"It may be legal in other countries but here it is not. That is why you always hear a call to stop ivory trade all over the world because any small or big demand anywhere pushes poachers to meet the demands."

Global trade in elephant ivory has largely been outlawed since 1989 after the animal's numbers plunged from millions in the mid-20th century.

The African Elephant Database estimates that by 2015, fewer than 415 000 of the giant mammals remained on the continent.

Thousands of conservationists and policymakers from more than 180 countries are currently meeting in Geneva to tighten rules on trade in elephant ivory and products from other endangered animal and plants.

The plight of African elephants is expected to dominate debate.

Some states are calling for the strongest possible level of protections for all African elephants, while countries in southern Africa, where populations have traditionally been better protected and healthier, are requesting the resumption of ivory stockpile sales.

[Lisbeth]

Zimbabwe leader blasts conservation watchdog over ivory trade

2019-08-27 22:29 | AFP

Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa has lambasted the regulator of global wildlife trade CITES over the continued ban in international ivory trade.

Global trade in ivory has largely been outlawed since 1989 after elephant numbers plunged from millions in the mid-20th century.

Zimbabwe and two of its neighbours Botswana and Namibia, had requested a resumption of ivory sales to clear their stockpiles and fund conservation activities.

But their proposal was rejected by governments at the ongoing Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Geneva.

The three countries' stockpiled ivory has a combined value of US$600 million (540.7 million euros), Mnangagwa said.

"It's a lot of money we can use for big projects," Mnangagwa was quoted as saying by the government daily, The Herald, on Tuesday.

"Our wild animals are being discussed in Geneva, an irrelevant place to the animals," he said referring to the 183-country forum.

"They bar us from killing our animals for selling ivory, but they want us to protect them from being poached," Mnangagwa protested.

"Europeans have consumed all their animals, but they want to set rules for us who have managed to conserve theirs."

Southern Africa is home to the majority of the remaining African elephants where populations have traditionally been better protected and healthier.

The overpopulation of the animals has resulted in them destroying crops and killing villagers living alongside the national parks where they are found.

The ivory stockpiles come from tusks from natural deaths, confiscations from poachers and culling.

Zimbabwe has permission to carry out culling to maintain a sustainable elephant population, but it has not done so in three decades.

"The last cull was in 1987, we have not carried out any because of disapproval by the various animal rights activists," Zimbabwe National Parks spokesman Tinashe Farawo told AFP.

Zimbabwe, which has an elephant population of 84 000 against it carrying capacity of 56 000, is permitted to issue licenses to commercial hunters to kill 500 elephants every year but most of the hunters take the tusks with them as trophies, said Farawo.

On Tuesday CITES imposed a near-total ban on exporting African elephants captured from the wild to zoos.

[Lisbeth]

Australia to ban domestic trade in elephant ivory and rhino horn

by Mongabay.com on 22 August 2019

- Australia has formally announced a plan to ban its domestic trade in elephant ivory and rhino horn.

- Sussan Ley, the country’s environment minister, said she would meet with ministers in November to ensure that steps are taken to ban domestic trade in ivory and rhino horn all jurisdictions.

- At the ongoing CITES meeting, a coalition of 30 African elephant range countries tabled a proposal asking all domestic markets of ivory to be closed. But the proposal was voted down.

Australia will soon ban the domestic trade in elephant ivory and rhino horn. The country’s delegates announced the decision at the ongoing 18th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES (CoP18) in Geneva.

Asian elephants and most populations of African elephants are listed on Appendix I of CITES, which prohibits all global trade in the mammals and their products. The ban, however, does not apply to domestic trade. Many countries that are party to CITES have allowed their domestic ivory markets to operate as long as the ivory was imported or acquired before the species were listed in CITES. However, some conservation groups and experts have warned that these legal domestic markets end up serving as conduits for illegal ivory to be passed off as antiques, perpetuating demand for ivory, which then leads to more elephant poaching.

“Australia has already ensured that all our international trade is in strict compliance with CITES regulations,” Sussan Ley, Australia’s environment minister, said in a statement. “Australia’s domestic market does not represent a major threat to world ivory trade but it is important to ensure there are no back doors to encourage illegal activity by those seeking to circumvent CITES principles.”

Ley added she would meet with ministers in November to ensure steps are taken to ban the domestic trade in ivory and rhino horn in all jurisdictions.

In September 2018, a parliamentary committee set up to inquire into the ivory and rhino horn trade in Australia published a report noting that a frequent criticism of Australia’s domestic markets was the inadequate monitoring and regulation of the domestic trade. The report highlighted concerns that “if Australia fails to implement a domestic trade ban, actors involved in the illegal trade could move their operations to Australia to exploit its weaker control framework.”

Among its recommendations, the committee asked “that the Commonwealth, states and territories, through the Council of Australian Governments, develop and implement a national domestic trade ban on elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn.” There could be some exemptions, the report noted, such as musical instruments made prior to 1975 and containing less than 20 percent ivory, and CITES-accredited museums and art institutions.


Elephant. Photo by Rhett A. Butler

African elephant. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
In recent years, countries like the U.S., China and U.K. have banned the domestic trade in elephant ivory. Domestic markets in many EU nations and Japan, however, still remain open.

At the ongoing CITES meeting, a coalition of 30 African elephant range countries tabled a proposal asking all domestic markets of ivory to be closed. The proposal was voted down. Instead, countries that are yet to close their domestic markets have been asked to report back on measures they plan on taking at the next CITES conference.

“Legal ivory markets and a lack of action against large illegal markets in certain countries continue to provide opportunities for criminal syndicates to traffic ivory,” Matt Collis, director of international policy at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and head of the organization’s delegation at CITES, said in a statement. “We urge countries whose legal domestic markets remain open, particularly Japan and the EU, to close them as a matter of urgency, and hope they will be in a position to report back on such steps at the next CITES conference.”

[Lisbeth]

Sunken ivory trove highlights historic decimation of forest elephants

By Don Pinnock• 14 January 2021


Photo via Unsplash

In 1533, a Portuguese trading ship, the ‘Bom Jesus’, went missing on its way to India. Today, its recovered ivory cargo off Namibia has revealed the decimation of forest elephants along the West African coast pre-dating European trans-Atlantic slavery.

The trading ship, discovered by offshore miners, carried a fortune in gold and silver coins and other valuable materials. But to a team of geneticists, conservation biologists and archaeologists, the most precious cargo on the Bom Jesus was more than 100 elephant tusks – the largest archaeological cargo of African ivory ever discovered.


Tusks from the Bom Jesus Shipwreck Cargo (Image from “Sourcing Elephant Ivory from a Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Shipwreck” published in Current Biology)

Their analysis has managed to pinpoint the origin of the ivory and tell a sad story of forest elephants assumed but never before documented in such precise detail. The finding makes it clear that ivory may have pre-dated European trans-Atlantic slavery as a central driver in maritime trading systems connecting Europe, Africa and Asia.

The Portuguese completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil in 1526, quite possibly on the back of an already established ivory trade. Forty years earlier they had reached the Congo River and were trading and plundering along the West African coast. In 1482 they built a fort at an established trading post at Elmina, on the south-western edge of the kingdom of Dahomey.

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Their primary quest was gold but, as a valuable commodity, ivory was next in line. And along the coast and further inland were forest elephants.

The genetic study of the sunken tusks, published in Current Biology, was able to identify 17 different herds with distinct haplotypes (each indicating the descent of many generations of reproduction). The types, or isotopes, of carbon and nitrogen in the tusks provided detail about where these elephants lived. The habitats from which they came were traced to forest areas which accord with the locations of major historic Portuguese trading ports.

The fact that the tusks originated from many different herds hints that multiple communities in West Africa were involved in supplying the ivory. But it’s unclear whether Portuguese traders gathered this diverse ivory from several locally sourced ports along the coast, or from a single port that was linked to extensive trading networks within the continent.

Having been lost at sea for nearly 500 years, the Bom Jesus ivory is incredibly well-preserved, Alida de Flamingh, a molecular biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told Science News.

“When the ship sank, the copper and lead ingots stored above the tusks kind of pushed the ivory down into the seabed”, protecting the tusks from scattering and erosion. A frigid ocean current also runs through this region of the Atlantic. “That really cold current probably helped preserve the DNA that was in the tusks,” de Flamingh said.

The tusks are of varying length and size (from 2- to 33kg) and the elephants seem to have been hunted indiscriminately, both males and females, young and old alike.

Of the 17 herds identified, only four remain in the West African forests today. The other elephant lineages most likely died out as a result of hunting or habitat destruction. According to the researchers, this reflects the disastrous effect of the ivory trade and the current reduction of the historic elephant range in West Africa of at least 93%.

Today forest elephants are under threat in West Africa and locally extinct in many of the countries along the coast. More than 60% have been poached within the past decade and the ones that remain inhabit only about a quarter of their historical range, according to the African Wildlife Foundation.

Forest elephant ivory is considered to be harder than savannah elephants and highly prized in the manufacture of Japanese Hanko signature stamps.


Hanko stamps (Image WikiCommons)

“The decrease in population size and genetic diversity,” says the report, “are associated with negative conservation outcomes … reduced reproductive fitness, and increased risk of population extirpation.

“The large number of tusks recovered from the Bom Jesus is evidence of ivory acquisition and circulation driving the formative stages of globalisation.”

Due to the difficulty of manoeuvring large long-distance trading vessels and the dangers of sailing close to the shore, outgoing ships on the India route typically did not tack along the African coastline.

Ivory from West Africa was generally shipped to the islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé and sent via smaller vessels to Casa da Índia in Lisbon, the central clearing house for African and Indian imports. These islands were to become the staging posts for the transatlantic slave route to the Americas.

According to the researchers, “Our study on the largest archaeological cargo of African ivory ever found provides a framework for examining one of the world’s most important raw materials throughout human history.” DM/ ML

[Klipspringer]

https://therevelator.org/southern-afric ... -delusion/

Southern Africa’s Ivory Delusion
The values of Zimbabwe’s and Namibia’s ivory stockpiles have been grossly overstated, and their proposed sale would lead to another poaching epidemic.

Op-Eds

April 9, 2021 - by Charan Saunders



Last year the world reacted in shock when Namibia announced plans to auction off 170 live elephants to the highest bidder.

Despite criticism, the plans have continued to move forward — and that may just be the start. Tucked away in a Feb. 1 press release justifying the auction was a rehash of the country’s oft-repeated desire to also sell ivory. The Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism’s stated:

“Namibia has major stockpiles of valuable wildlife products including ivory which it can produce sustainably and regulate properly, and which if traded internationally could support our elephant conservation and management for decades to come.”

Namibia is not alone in this desire to capitalize on its wildlife. In Zimbabwe’s national assembly last year, the minister of environment valued the country’s stockpile of 130 metric tonnes (143 tons) of ivory and 5 tonnes (5.5 tons) of rhino horn at $600 million in U.S. dollars. This figure, which would value ivory at more than $4,200 per kilogram, has since been seized upon by commentators seeking to justify the reintroduction of the ivory trade.

I’m an environmental accountant dedicated to ethical conservation, so I wanted to understand these numbers and how they motivate countries. In truth, I found not even full black-market value comes close to arriving at this figure.

Black-market values are, of course, often invisible to the general public, but the most recent data from criminal justice experts finds that unworked (or raw) elephant ivory sells for about $92/kg on the black market in Africa, while rhino horn is currently selling for $8,683/kg.

Therefore, a more realistic valuation of Zimbabwe’s ivory stockpiles, using an optimistic wholesale price of $150/kg, would give a potential income of only $19.5 million in U.S. dollars.

This is a 30th of Zimbabwe’s estimate.

And even then, those numbers fail to account for the disaster that would happen if ivory sales return — as we saw in the all-too-recent past.


The One-Off Sales
International trade in ivory has been banned since 1989, following a 10-year period in which African elephant numbers declined by 50%, from 1.3 million to 600,000. However, in 1999 and 2008 CITES allowed “one-off sales” of stockpiled ivory, to disastrous effect. The selling prices achieved then were only $100/kg and $157/kg, in U.S. dollars respectively, due to collusion by official Chinese and Japanese buyers.

The intention of CITES in approving the one-off ivory sales was to introduce a controlled and steady supply of stockpiled ivory into the market. The legal supply, coupled with effective systems of control, aimed to satisfy demand and reduce prices. This in turn should have reduced the profitability of (and the demand for) illegal ivory. Poaching should have followed suit and decreased.

Instead, the sales led to an increase in demand and, consequently, an increase in elephant poaching. The 2008 ivory sale was accompanied by a 66% increase in illegally traded ivory and a 71% increase in ivory smuggling. An investigation in 2010 by the Environmental Investigation Agency documented that 90% of the ivory being sold in China came from illegal sources.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) comparison of elephant poaching figures for the five years preceding and five years following the sale showed an “abrupt, significant, permanent, robust and geographically widespread increase” in poaching.

The problem has not faded away. Most recently the two African elephant species (savanna and forest) were declared endangered and critically endangered due to their continued poaching threat.

Still, some African nations look fondly at the 2008 sale and have long hoped to repeat it. The Zimbabwe Ministry’s 2020 statement follows yet another proposal to the 18th CITES Conference of the Parties (COP18) by Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana to trade in live elephants and their body parts, including ivory. The proposal was not accepted by the parties.


Why Didn’t Ivory Sales Work?
The one-off sales of ivory removed the stigma associated with its purchase, stimulated the market demand, and increased prices.

The ivory that China purchased in 2008 for $157/kg was drip-fed by the authorities to traders at prices ranging between $800 and $1,500 per kilogram. This meant that the bulk of the profits went to filling Chinese government coffers — not to African nations — and in doing so, created a large illegal market which drove prices even higher.

Raw ivory prices in China increased from $750/kg in 2010 to $2,100/kg in 2014. The market had been stimulated, prices increased and the volume of legal ivory available was insufficient to meet demand as the Chinese government gradually fed its stockpile into the market.

Japan, the other participant in the one-off sales, has systematically failed to comply with CITES regulations, meaning that there were (and still are) no controls over ivory being sold, allowing the illegal markets to function in parallel to the legal one.

In a very short space of time, criminals ramped up poaching and elephant numbers plummeted.

What Has Happened to the Price of Ivory Since Then?
With no recent legal international sales, combined with the significant U.S., Chinese and United Kingdom domestic ivory sales bans, the price for raw ivory paid by craftsmen in China fell from $2,100/kg in 2014 to $730/kg in 2017. That’s when China closed all of its official ivory carving outlets and theoretically stopped all official ivory trade.

The price currently paid for raw ivory in Asia, according to an investigation by the Wildlife Justice Commission, is currently between $597/kg and $689/kg, in U.S. dollars. Ivory sourced in Africa and sold in Asia has additional costs such as transportation, taxes and broker commissions. The prices paid for raw ivory in Africa have decreased correspondingly from $208/kg to $92/kg in 2020.

Those numbers pale in comparison to a living elephant. A 2014 study found that live elephants are each worth an estimated $1.6 million in ecotourism opportunities.


Funding Conservation
One half-truth is that the money earned from the legal sale will be used to effectively fund conservation.

One of the CITES conditions of the 2008 sale was that funds were to go to the conservation of elephants. South Africa placed a substantial portion of the income from its share of the pie in the Mpumalanga Problem Animal Fund — which, it turns out, was well-named. An internal investigation found the fund had “no proper controls” and that “tens of millions” of rand (the official currency of South Africa) had bypassed the normal procurement processes.

Ironically, proceeds were also partly used for the refurbishment of the Skukuza abattoir, where most of the 14,629 elephant carcasses from culling operations between 1967 and 1997 were processed.

All the while, Africa’s elephant populations continued to decline.


How to Stop Poaching
In light of these deficiencies — and in light of elephants’ recently declared endangered status — the very reverse of actual conservation can be expected if any nation is again allowed to sell its ivory stockpiles. The cost of increased anti-poaching efforts required from the consequent increase in poaching will outweigh the benefit of any income from the sale of ivory stockpiles.

To stop poaching, all international and local trade must be stopped.

Repeating this failed experiment will send a message that it is acceptable to trade in ivory. Ivory carving outlets in China will re-open and demand for ivory will be stimulated. The demand for ivory in an increasingly wealthy and better-connected Asia will quickly outstrip legal supply and poaching will increase.

Meanwhile, the management of a legal ivory trade requires strong systems of control at every point in the commodity chain to ensure that illegal ivory is not laundered into the legal market. With recalcitrant Japan continuing to ignore CITES, “untransparent” Namibia “losing tolerance” with CITES, and Zimbabwe ranking 157 out of 179 on the corruption perceptions index, not even the basics for controlled trade are in place.

Therefore, aside from the strong theoretical economic arguments against renewed one-off sales, the practical arguments are perhaps even stronger: If international ivory and rhino horn sales ever again become legal, the cost to protect elephants will skyrocket and these culturally valuable animals will plunge into decline — and possibly extinction.



Charan Saunders grew up in Cape Town and studied genetics and microbiology and then went on to qualify as a chartered accountant. She has worked in London in the forensic science field and was the chief financial officer of a major vaccine manufacturer for six years. She now serves as a financial director in the field of conservation.

[Richprins]

I'm sure some of SA's ivory would also find its way to the market regularly!