China’s rush for ivory ill omen for Africa’s jumbos

Tucked into a grimy building in Guangzhou, a small band of Chinese master carvers chip away at ivory tusks with chisels, fashioning them into the sorts of intricate carvings that were prized by Chinese emperors.

A passion for ivory ornaments such as these is what helped decimate African and Asian elephant populations until a 1989 ban on ivory trade.

Today, China’s economic rise, and along with it a seemingly insatiable appetite for status symbols by its nouveau riche, has spurred demand for African ivory.

In remote pockets of Africa, such as the Tsavo East region in Kenya where giraffe wander lazily across tarmac freshly laid by Chinese labourers; and in teeming market towns on the banks of the Nile in Sudan where Chinese barter and buy ivory openly; the Chinese imprint is conspicuous and growing.

Organised crime gangs

“The Chinese are all over Africa and are buying up ivory, worked and raw,” said Esmond Martin, a conservationist who has closely tracked Chinese involvement in the black market ivory trade.

“The last time I was up in Khartoum or Omdurman I found that about 75 per cent of all the ivory being sold was bought by Chinese,” he added.

In a 2007 report, the UN-backed CITES, the global wildlife trade watchdog, said China faced a “major challenge” as it continues to be the “most important country globally as a destination for illicit ivory,” exacerbated in part by China’s spreading influence and ties in Africa.

Chinese nationals have been arrested and convicted for ivory smuggling in Africa and organised crime gangs are also involved in bringing large quantities of illicit ivory into China, according to the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency.

In a controversial bid to stem illegal poaching, CITES allowed a 62-tonne batch of elephant tusks to be imported legally into China last year. The ivory stockpiles were bought by Chinese traders at auctions.

At the time, Allan Thornton, of the Environmental Investigation Agency, expressed concern the sale would fuel a massive appetite for ivory in China.

“In a country of 1.3 billion people, demand for ivory from just a fraction of one per cent of the population is colossal,” he told the Telegraph newspaper.

Ivory has been banned since 1989 after decades of poaching in which Africa’s elephant population was halved with only around 600,000 remaining by 1997, according to conservation groups.

The CITES secretariat in Geneva noted a trend of long-time expatriate Chinese residents in Africa getting heavily involved in the trade, while quite a number of lower-level ivory couriers recently arrested have been mainland Chinese residents.

While most countries enforce the ban on ivory, in recent years China and Japan have been permitted to buy non-poached ivory from several African countries in a move aimed at raising money for wildlife conservation, and to smother demand for poached ivory with a steady flow of cheaper tusks.