Conservationists are hopeful that China’s recent blow to its legal ivory trade will make it easier to crack down on poaching and the illegal ivory trade.
Late last month, China made a big move toward shuttering elephant ivory’s largest domestic market. These are some of the first steps in the landmark 2015 agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and American President Barack Obama to all but obliterate their domestic ivory markets. National Geographic reports that China’s State Forestry Administration will be closing 67 of its licensed ivory facilities, including 12 of its 35 ivory carving factories and several dozen of its more than 130 ivory retailers.
Elephant ivory trafficking has reached a crisis point. 2016’s Great Elephant Census reported that 144,000 elephants were lost to poaching over the last decade. And while the international trade in ivory has been illegal since 1990, the U.S. and Chinese domestic markets have continued a trade that inevitably results in more dead elephants. In the U.S., trade is allowed if the ivory entered the country legally before 1990, if the elephant was killed before 1976, and if the item falls within a variety of antique and hunting trophy categorizations. In China, the state owns carving factories and sourced by a slow distribution of ivory from Africa. These small allowances subsequently created feverish demand and a stock of legal ivory that illegal ivory is masked by, driving value so high that poaching has become big business. Experts agree that a complete international ban
In the U.S., trade is allowed if the ivory entered the country legally before 1990, if the elephant was killed before 1976, and if the item falls within a variety of antique and hunting trophy categorizations. In China, the state owns carving factories and sourced by a slow distribution of ivory from Africa. These small allowances subsequently created feverish demand and a stock of illegal ivory – masked by legal ivory – driving value so high that poaching has become big business. Experts agree that a complete international ban on the trade of ivory is the only thing that will prevent the decimation of elephant species in the near future.
Now, international pressures to end the ivory trade seem to finally be having their desired effect. After former President Obama’s 2013 executive order to fight wildlife trafficking and the 2015 international agreement with China, 2016 saw a near-total ban on the domestic U.S. ivory trade. In fact, in four states, California, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, you can’t trade ivory at all – no matter its age or source. China’s move to shut down dozens of licensed ivory facilities and carving factories is a much-anticipated step toward disrupting the end markets that fuel the growth of international wildlife trafficking syndicates. And one that makes good on China’s goal of completely ending the ivory market by the end of 2017.
