Word: tradings
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...ivory wars continued until 1989, when countries at the global Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) voted to ban all trade in elephant ivory. With trade choked off, demand for ivory plummeted; African governments, with Western aid, cracked down on remaining poachers. Elephant populations in Africa began to rebound slowly. (See 10 species nearing extinction...
...least 700,000 elephants, and possibly as many as 1 million, were slaughtered throughout Africa, killed by hunters and poachers for their ivory tusks, which would be made into jewelry. The substance was so valuable it was known as "white gold," and international organized-crime arose around the trade, adding human carnage to the animal toll. Poachers would often kill baby elephants, even though they possessed tiny tusks, in order to draw out grieving mothers who would be murdered in turn. "The slaughter of elephants on the ground in Africa was just terrible," says Paul Todd, program manager...
Although the elephant-trade ban has been in place since 1989, real protection for the threatened species ended in 1997. That's when pro-ivory trade forces pushed through a decision in CITES that allowed a one-time exception to the ban on sales of stockpiled ivory. The idea was that by allowing a few legal sales, pressure for ivory goods would diminish, mostly in richer Asian nations, and therefore reduce the demand for poaching. If poaching was an illegal drug, stockpile sales were the methadone. (See pictures of India's contraband wildlife...
...mortality attributed to poaching rose from 22% in 2003 to 62% in 2009. The wholesale price of high-quality ivory went from $200 per kilogram to $850 per kilogram in 2007, and then doubled again by 2009. As economies boomed in Asia - the destination for much of the ivory trade, at least initially - demand for white gold continued to rise. And ivory-trade regulation in the U.S. is confusing and full of holes - ivory was even being traded on eBay until the Internet vendor shut down the sale of it recently. "The data shows that the U.S. is the second...
That will remain the case as long as stockpile sales remain, flooding the market with ivory and weakening what was once a powerful moral prohibition against the trade. It doesn't help that in 2007 CITES gave South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe permission to sell 110 tons of stockpiled ivory to China and Japan. The E.U. allowed that sale on the condition that there would be a nine-year moratorium on future stockpile sales, but CITES applied that ban only to those four countries - leaving Tanzania and Zambia open to request their own sales. "We keep moving the goalposts...