Can the ivory trade be stopped?

This is an African forest elephant that is native to the Congo basin of Africa. It is different in several ways from the bush elephant of the savannahs of Eastern and Southern Africa; it is smaller, has more rounded ears, and has straighter tusks. It is the tusks that are the reason why the forest elephant is an endangered species.

The ivory trade is illegal across the world but that does not stop it continuing, and on a stupendous scale. Markets in Angola, Nigeria and Sudan blatantly offer for sale thousands of items made from ivory, and there are plenty of willing buyers. An investigator recently came across a market in Luanda, the capital of Angola, where at least 10,000 ivory trinkets were openly displayed.

The trade in ivory claims around 33,000 African elephants every year. The species cannot afford to lose this many animals without being put under serious threat of extinction.

So who is buying the ivory and therefore fuelling the trade? In Angola, it is almost exclusively Chinese expatriate workers who buy the items to take home with them. Ivory has enormous significance as a status symbol among the China middle class, and people will gladly pay ten times the price that is charged by the market traders in Luanda.

There is therefore a very strong temptation for Chinese workers to smuggle small ivory articles out of the country and sell them to eager buyers back home in China. There are around 250,000 Chinese workers in Angola at any one time, so if only a small proportion take this course when they leave, the amount of ivory leaving the country could still be enormous.

The way to stop the trade is to curb the demand. This has been done very successfully in the west, with potential consumers realising the harm that was being done in the wild by their desire to own ivory artefacts. However, this message has still not got home in China. Governments do not like to criticise China, for fear of losing valuable contracts and export markets, so the protests being made are low-key or completely absent.

It is high time that this attitude changed. The Chinese government has it within its power to enforce bans on ivory imports. Searching all workers at the airport as they return from Africa, and punishing anyone found with ivory items on them, would be a good start.

© John Welford