To end elephant slaughter, the U.S. should eliminate its own ivory market

By Maria Sanchez Diez
12 June 2015 (Quartz) – As China, long notorious for its appetite for elephant ivory, moves toward halting the domestic processing and sale of the ornamental material, some international wildlife organizations are pointing the finger at another country that shares responsibility for the slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants a year by poachers in Africa: the United States, the second-largest retail market for ivory in the world after China. The timeline for China’s eradication of its ivory trade remains unclear, but at a recent event in Beijing where more than 1,500 pounds of confiscated ivory were symbolically destroyed, Zhao Shucong, leader of China’s State Forestry Administration, said: “We will strictly control ivory processing and trade until the commercial processing and sale of ivory and its products are eventually halted.” Meanwhile, the United States still has a legal market for ivory, and its laws include loopholes that allow the illegal ivory market to persist, wildlife advocates say. They have argued that even a very restricted legal trade stimulates the demand for ivory and, therefore, supports the black market. In the meantime, the poaching crisis in Africa has reached unprecedented and devastating levels: Tanzania has lost close to 60% of its elephants, and Mozambique 50%. Last year, president Barack Obama’s administration announced a set of efforts to restrict and eliminate the ivory trade. The National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking & Commercial Ban on Trade in Elephant Ivory included a complete ban on the commercial import and export of African elephant ivory, prohibited interstate sales of all ivory items except authentic antiques (it will be illegal to sell or buy ivory items, unless it can be proven that they are more than 100 years old) and limited to two the number of elephant trophies that a hunter can bring into the country per year. However, these measures are not fully implemented yet, and they have been stuck in a “bureaucratic maze,” according to Peter LaFontaine, campaigns officer of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). “It has been a slow process, made even more difficult by opposition from the National Rifle Association and trophy hunting groups, but the leadership over at U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service seems to be committed to closing as many loopholes as possible in order to remove the US from the poaching equation.” LaFontaine told Quartz. […] IFAW calculates that there are less than half a million elephants left alive in Africa. Every 15 minutes one of them is killed. [more]

To end elephant slaughter, the US should eliminate its own ivory market