Effort to save elephants gets royal boost, and none too soon

Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, used his visit to Washington to highlight the urgency of saving elephants from being slaughtered to extinction for their tusks.

Speaking before the World Bank's International Corruption Hunters Alliance on Monday, he said, "It's easy to blame others for the problem - demand in Southeast Asia, not enough protection on the ground, and so on. But, if I may say, we could start with looking closer to home. Our own nations still have thriving black markets in these products, and we have to raise the game at home as well as abroad."

He cited reports saying that in the last 25 years, the wholesale street price of raw ivory in China and South East Asia had risen to $2,100 per kilogram from $5. And that boom was reflected in poaching.

He cited figures from 2011, when 17 major seizures by customs officials netted "a staggering 27,000 kilograms of ivory - equivalent to the tusks of at least 3,000 elephants". And it's only gotten worse in the last two years.

The scale of the trafficking, he said, suggests the supply chain is taking advantage of globalization, hiding within the huge flow of goods across borders and exploiting technology from helicopters and precision weapons to the lawless market of the Internet.

"As rare animal populations are shrinking, demand is surging, with the perverse effect of making trafficked wildlife more valuable," the Duke said.

The day after his speech a new report was released saying that by every metric, the ivory industry in China was exploding upward, especially in the last five years.

The number of official licensed (or legal) ivory factories in China increased from nine in 2004 to 37 in 2013, according to the report written by ivory researchers Lucy Vigne and Esmond Martin and funded by Save the Elephants and the Aspinall Foundation.

In the same period, the number of licensed retail ivory outlets in China rose from 31 to 145. But illegal shops outnumbered legal ones by a factor of three in Beijing and a factor of eight in Shanghai.

In 2010, ivory factory managers in southern China paid $750 a kilo for tusk on the black market. By early 2014, the wholesale price in Beijing for a similar tusk was $2,100 a kilo.

"A continuing problem with the ivory industry of China is the illegal sector, which is thriving," the report said. Many small shops sell ivory without a license and official Collection cards - the control mechanism required for each piece sold legally - are often reused.

Other shops sell elephant ivory under the guise of mammoth ivory, which is legal. The two are difficult to tell apart - only DNA and carbon dating can make the distinction and that takes time, money and a piece of the object. So with no quick, on-site test, inspections are problematic.

The report says the Chinese government has increased law enforcement efforts in recent years, closing down at least 10 officially designated factories and retail outlets, jailing hundreds of dealers and sentencing 37 smugglers to life in prison.

Official inspections of retail outlets, which are scattered across cities, "are not frequent or rigorous enough to drastically eliminate these loopholes and illegal activities".

"Most ivory is bought on the retail market by Chinese collectors and by growing numbers of investors reportedly anticipating further restrictions on the ivory trade as well as possible growing scarcity in ivory due to future worldwide ivory stockpile destructions," the report says.

"At the moment we are not winning the conservation battle against the elephant poachers, traffickers and consumers of ivory. Laws are in place but even in China they are not being adequately enforced. The system is presently out of control," the authors say.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper Wednesday, Paula Kahumbu, CEO of Kenya-based WildlifeDirect, cites the study's conclusion that "without China's leadership in ending demand for ivory Africa's elephants could disappear from the wild within a generation".

"Unfortunately," she adds, "so far few African leaders have demonstrated they are serious about taking action. One of them, Botswana's environment minister Tshekedi Khama, recently asked me, despairingly: 'Where is the pride of Africa? Why aren't we setting the agenda here? It is we who have the elephants."

"Africans," she concludes, echoing Prince William's concern, "will not have the political or moral authority to make demands on the Chinese until we put our own house in order."

Contact the writer at chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com.