China set to ban ivory trade as pressure mounts on Honk Kong

Ivory trade in China ould soon be a thing of the past

Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to halt the commercial trade in ivory in his country during a state visit to Washington, but gave few details about the timing and extent of such a move. Now, a senior U.S. government official says that the Chinese ban could be in place within a year or so, with very narrow exceptions, describing it as a “huge” deal, the Washington Post reports.
Such a move, conservationists say, would be a major step towards ending the poaching crisis that is decimating Africa’s elephant herds.
“This commitment goes all the way up to President Xi,” Catherine Novelli, U.S. undersecretary for economic growth, energy, and the environment in the State Department said in a telephone interview. “They have made it very clear this is what they want to do.”
But even as optimism mounts, the spotlight is turning to Hong Kong, the former British enclave that has long been a center of the global trade in wildlife trafficking.
There, the authorities’ reluctance to clamp down on legal ivory traders has allowed a much larger illegal trade to flourish, conservationists say, and has established the territory as a key transit point in the smuggling of ivory from Africa into China.

“Hong Kong has always been the ivory laundry of the world,”said Peter Knights, executive director of WildAid in San Francisco. “The moral imperative has shifted from China and the U.S, who are in a position to say they are going to close the ivory trade down, to Hong Kong to do the same.”
The United States and China have agreed to enact “nearly complete bans” on ivory import and export, “and to take significant and timely steps to halt the domestic commercial trade of ivory.”
China is by far the biggest ivory market in the world, with a flourishing domestic ivory carving and trading industry that is supposed to use only old stockpiles but actually provides cover for the laundering of huge quantities of newly poached ivory. Ivory remains a status symbol in China, but outlawing the domestic trade would go a long way to making it as unfashionable there as it is in the West.
In the past, China had argued that ivory carving was part of its cultural heritage, but it has gradually come to realize that its role in the poaching industry was damaging its global reputation, particularly in Africa.
Authorities there are already reviewing what regulations needed to be amended, and discussing with experts how to go about buying back existing ivory stockpiles, she said.
Time is of the essence.
Africa’s elephant herds have dwindled from around 1.2 million 40 years ago to between 400,000 and 500,000 now. Central African forest elephants could be extinct within the next decade on current trends.
Hong Kong allows ivory stockpiled before a 1989 global ban to be freely sold, but, under international regulations, it must not be taken out of the territory. Traders have to register the weight of their stockpiles, but critics say there is no regulation on sales.
Video filmed by independent investigators for WildAid and WWF, and supplied to the Washington Post, showed traders boasting they could easily replenish their pre-1989 stock with newly poached ivory.