Ivory from 10,000 elephants on sale amid fears of new slaughter

Ivory went on sale legally yesterday for the first time in almost a decade when the southern African state of Namibia auctioned seven tonnes of elephant tusks exclusively to Chinese and Japanese buyers.

The much criticised sale, which raised $1.18 million (£743,000), heralded two weeks of rolling auctions that will put 108 tonnes of ivory — the equivalent of more than 10,000 dead elephants — under the hammer in a one-off sale to the Far East, where the product is used mainly in traditional medicines and for official seals to stamp formal documents.



Wildlife groups and other African nations fear that the controversial sell-off could breathe life back into the ivory trade, banned in 1989, and trigger a resurgence of the poaching that devastated Africa’s elephant populations in the 1970s and 1980s.

Julian Newman, campaigns director with the Environmental Investigation Agency, said that the move could once again open the floodgates to poaching, which reduced Africa’s total elephant population from five million in the 1930s to about 600,000 today. “This [auction], coupled with a lack of sufficient checks in importing countries such as China and instability in some African range states, could easily drag us back to the dark and bloody days of the 1980s when we were seeing around 200 elephants killed by poachers each week.” Conservationists argue that a lack of proper oversight will allow poachers to mix illegal and legal ivory and slip it past regulators, many of them corrupt.