A booming ivory trade in China has led to hundreds of thousands of African elephants killed for their tusks, bringing the animals in danger of disappearing from the wild, a nonprofit said in a Tuesday report.
Between 2010 and 2012, 100,000 elephants have been slaughtered to satisfy a growing Chinese middle-class with a desire for ivory goods, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save The Elephants, said according to The Washington Times.
In China, the world's largest ivory consumer, the price of elephant tusks has tripled since 2010. Legitimate suppliers and retailers have also quadrupled in the last ten years, but they are outpaced by a massive ivory black market based mostly in Beijing and Shanghai, the report said.
"China holds the key to the future of elephants," Douglas-Hamilton said according to the newspaper. "Without China's leadership in ending demand for ivory, Africa's elephants could disappear form the wild within a generation."
China has tried cracking down on illegal ivory sales by giving life sentences to 37 smugglers and shutting down at least 10 illegal outlets, the study found. But experts say that won't help as long as the government allows the sale of ivory at legitimate outlets, where illegally obtained ivory often ends up.
"[China has] already taken some very important steps to crack down on enforcement within the country," Andrew Wetzler, land and wildlife program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Washington Times. "But what we're finding in China is the same thing that we found in the United States,...namely that the existence of legal markets facilitate the existence of illegal markets.
"It makes it very, very difficult to eliminate them," Wetzler said.
After China, the U.S. has the second largest ivory market, the newspaper noted.
Ivory trade was banned in 1989 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Part of the ban was overturned in 2008 when the convention allowed China to purchase a 62-metric ton quota. But the regulated system has spiraled out of control and the only way to fix it is to install the ban again, says Peter Knights, executive director of the charity WildAid.
"To reverse that position, to stop those legal sales, one would assume that something familiar to what happened in 1989 would then happen," Knights told The Washington Times.
"The demand would go down, the ability to advertise and promote these products in retail outlets would be gone and that would suppress the demand."
