Ivory trade

DEFINITION: Buying and selling of the tusks of certain mammals, primarily elephants

The international trade in ivory decimated the world’s once-abundant elephant populations, but a 1990 international ban on the trade has done much to restore the species.

Ivory is made up of enamel, a resilient material found in mammalian teeth. The principal source of ivory is elephant tusks, although the teeth of the hippopotamus and walrus and of some types of whales and boars are also considered to be ivory. Tusks, also called "raw" ivory, grow on the male Indian, or Asian, elephant Elaphus maximus and on both sexes in the African elephant (in 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature began listing two separate species of African elephant based on expert consensus, the savanna elephant, or Loxodonta africana, and the forest elephant, or Loxodonta cyclotis).

Diverse human societies have used ivory for centuries to make crafts and medicines and in rituals. The impact on elephant populations was originally minimal. Trade in ivory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was limited by the difficulty in obtaining ivory and by low demand. The twentieth century witnessed an explosion in the ivory trade driven by the enormous profits that could be made in exporting ivory to Western and Eastern countries from India and, especially, Africa. Such profits soon precipitated a large illegal trade in ivory, and poaching became rampant.

In both Asia and Africa, elephant populations were decimated by ivory poaching. The African elephant used to roam most of the continent but has now been reduced to isolated populations in protected national parks and wildlife reserves. The African elephant population was estimated at 1.3 million in 1979; it had dropped to 750,000 in 1988 and 600,000 by 1992; by 2010, experts estimated that the number had dwindled further to 400,000. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 415,000 African elephants were in the wild in 2022. Despite the population increase, African elephants were still listed as endangered during this year.

The Ivory Market

Massive hunting of African elephants started in 1970 to satisfy the great demand for raw ivory in consumer countries, where it was converted into expensive items and medicines, including stock for ivory carving. Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and China were the major markets. The price of raw ivory rose from $3 per pound in 1975 to $125 per pound by 1987. The slaughter of elephants in producer countries was accelerated by poverty—a single elephant could fetch up to $3,600, which at that time was more than many in impoverished countries could make over the course of five years. Moreover, most of the countries involved in the ivory trade did not have the personnel and equipment needed to protect elephants, and corrupt government officials exacerbated the problem by participating in the trade themselves.

The effects of the widespread hunting on the species were significant. Since poachers went for the elephants with the largest tusks, the average tusk size among surviving elephants decreased from 9.8 kilograms (21.6 pounds) to 4.7 kilograms (10.4 pounds). Elephants are slow to reproduce and take years to mature; the relentless killing reduced the average elephant’s life span from sixty years to only thirty years. The herds’ tight matriarchal social systems were also disrupted. Selective removal of large bulls created a dearth of breeding males and lowered genetic diversity.

Banning the Ivory Trade

Scientists and nonscientists alike predicted the demise of the largest terrestrial animal unless immediate measures were implemented to save it, and in the 1970s a global effort was initiated to halt the decline in elephant populations. In 1978, the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) called for protection of elephants and their habitats, and elephants were placed on the agreement’s list of threatened species. In June 1989, President George H. W. Bush authorized a moratorium on all ivory imports into the United States, and in October, elephants were moved to the CITES list of endangered species. The US Congress passed the African Elephant Conservation Act the same year. Other countries joined the moratorium, and a total ban on the ivory trade by 103 CITES signatory nations was declared in 1990. Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Hong Kong voted against the ban, but Kenya, one of the African countries where poaching was rampant, demonstrated its support of the measure by burning 12 tons of confiscated tusks, representing the deaths of two thousand elephants; the ivory destroyed was valued at three million dollars.

In the wake of the ban’s adoption, the price of ivory plummeted to one dollar per pound. As profits declined, so did poaching, and elephant populations in southern African countries increased by as much as 25 percent, sometimes exceeding the local carrying capacities. Habitat destruction, especially in woodland areas, occurred because elephants strip and knock down trees in search of succulent bark and leaves. Increased elephant-human interaction also led to stresses, as rogue elephants sometimes tore down fences, raided farms, and occasionally killed people. As a result, measures to cull herds were adopted in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The meat from culled elephants was distributed to local communities to supplement their food supplies.

The ban was not embraced by all countries. As of 2021, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Vietnam all had illegal ivory markets. The World Wildlife Fund estimated that about forty-seven elephants were being illegally killed per day.

Other Measures

In 1997, several southern African countries were allowed to sell their legal stockpiles of ivory to Japan, and in 2008 a similar sale was made to China. The ivory was required to be coded and marked by country of origin, and the codes were entered into a database that would enable tracking of the ivory by the Ivory Monitoring Unit. However, genetic and isotope markers used on "worked ivory" are not foolproof, raising the possibility of a renewed illegal trade in ivory. In the former ivory-producing nations of Africa, efforts toward generating revenue shifted to tourism. Limited hunting of elephants, in which tourists pay up to ten thousand dollars for the opportunity, was allowed in nations including Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa.

The 2010s saw a significant upsurge in elephant poaching, a trend believed to be driven by increasing demand for ivory in China. African forest elephant populations, in particular, declined in the face of this demand, while some Savannah populations also suffered. In late 2017, China announced that it would end its legal domestic ivory trade effective on the last day of that year. The Chinese ban was preceded by a major public-awareness campaign aimed at explaining the negative effect of the ivory trade on elephant populations. The United Kingdom also announced plans to end trade in ivory, with a few exceptions such as for culturally important items and musical instruments, in late 2017. While by the end of 2018 the proposed bill had been accepted through Parliament to become law as the Ivory Act 2018, its implementation was delayed into the early 2020s by legal challenges from groups such as antiques dealers. In 2019, Australia formally announced its intention to ban domestic ivory trading.

In contrast to these efforts to further restrict the ivory trade, the United States under the administration of President Donald Trump reversed a ban on the import of ivory in 2018. The reversal allowed elephant trophies legally hunted in Zambia and Zimbabwe to be imported to the United States on a case-by-case basis; President Barack Obama had overseen a near-total ban of the ivory trade by 2016. The Trump administration argued that support for legal elephant hunting would prove financially beneficial to overall conservation efforts. Critics countered that despite such claims, trophy hunting often fails to improve conservation. Many pointed to figures indicating that elephant populations in Zimbabwe had declined by 6 percent between 2001 and 2017, while Zambia's elephants numbered just around 21,000 at the time the US import ban was lifted, indicating poor wildlife management that would be further harmed by demand form US hunters.

In 2022, the Biden Administration strengthened the protections of internationally traded live elephants. The new rules required that countries importing elephants to the United States implement laws to increase conservation and protection. These include barring illegal trade. Authorized imports of both live elephants and elephant trophies must contribute to conservation efforts and not cause a decrease in the population of elephants.

Meanwhile, additional governmental jurisdictions considered instituting ivory trade bans, with Singapore's ban going into effect in September 2021. As the European Parliament began formally advocating for a ban in the European Union (EU) beginning in 2018 (the EU had banned the exportation of raw ivory in 2017), early 2021 saw the release of draft measures proposed by the European Commission toward an effective, stricter overall ban. At the same time, scientists studying Mozambique elephants released a paper detailing that they had found evidence of more of those born in areas with higher rates of poaching being born without tusks, potentially indicating an example of a "rapid evolution" of this trait.

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