Report slams HK ivory trade
Print Edition
Hong Kong’s booming ivory market is helping push elephants toward extinction, conservationists said yesterday.
The sale of ivory items from government-registered stockpiles predating the 1989 ban is legal for domestic use in Hong Kong, but a report by Save the Elephants found tusks from recently slaughtered animals were being passed off as old ivory, and that it was being bought and then smuggled into China’s mainland on a huge scale.
“Hong Kong’s ivory trade is creating a significant loophole in international efforts to end the killing of elephants in Africa,” said the report released in Kenya and Hong Kong.
“No other city surveyed has so many pieces of ivory on sale as Hong Kong,” said Esmond Martin, the report’s co-author.
The report found more than 30,800 items for sale in 72 stores and estimated that more than 90 percent of sales were to buyers from the mainland.
Lax border controls and the volume of people crossing abetted the trade, which is having a major impact on efforts to end poaching, it said.
“A mass slaughtering of African elephants is under way, yet the Hong Kong government is turning a blind eye,” said Alex Hofford of WildAid.
“For 25 years since the international ban, Hong Kong’s ivory traders appear to have been laundering poached ivory from illegally killed elephants into their stocks,” said Hofford.
The report described Hong Kong as the world’s third largest ivory smuggling hub after Kenya and Tanzania.
A Hong Kong government spokeswoman, however, disputed the report and said there was “no plan” to ban the trade.
“There is no evidence showing that Hong Kong’s legal ivory trade contributes to the poaching of elephants in Africa or provides a cover for the laundering of smuggled illegal ivory,” she said.
Beijing has made efforts to curb the trade, stepping up prosecutions of smugglers and seizures of ivory, but campaigners say the measures have not gone far enough.
“Unless the ivory trade in Hong Kong is closed down the territory will continue to represent a major threat to the survival of the species,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants.
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