The Chinese government ruled on Friday to completely ban commerce in ivory within the nation’s borders by 2017. The move is projected to play a major role in future elephant conservation, as well as in the decline of illegal elephant poaching throughout the African continent.
The decision also follows years of pressure and encouragement from the international community to close the market, likely in part, due to the more than 100,000 elephants that the lucrative trade has killed in the last 10 years alone.
“China’s announcement is a game changer for elephant conservation,” Carter Roberts, the president and chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund, said in a written statement. With the United States also ending its domestic ivory trade earlier this year, two of the largest ivory markets have taken action that will reverberate around the world.
In late August 2016, the Great Elephant Census revealed, there are just 352,271 African elephants that are still roaming the majority of the African savannah. The current yearly loss is estimated at about eight percent, or 27,000 elephants killed per year.
“[The ban] may be the biggest sign of hope for elephants since the current poaching crisis began,” Elly Pepper, a wildlife advocate with the Natural Resources Defense, said in a statement.
Chinese investors are known to favor the substance in jewelry, sculpture, and other forms of finery, maintaining the strongest support of the ivory industry in the last decade, the “white gold” streaming into the nation to be sold and intricately carved for consumers.
For hundreds of years, ivory has played an important role in Chinese culture as well, through suggested healing powers in in its’ powdered form, and its symbolism as an honorable gift to a peer. In an attempt to better legitimize the trade in 2006, the Chinese government even placed ivory on its official Intangible Cultural Heritage Registrar.
When the first ivory bans were rolled out in the late 1980s, Zhou Bai of the Old Phoenix Auspicious Jade and Ivory Carving Company was worried this art would die with him. The cultural shine to intricate ivory carving, located in Shanghai, has stood for almost 120 years, first opening its doors in 1898. Shoppers can purchase anything from the famed ivory sculpture work and carvings, to ivory brooches and even bookmarks and chopsticks within the factory’s store.
Due to law enforcement and time-worn salutary neglect on the part of world powers, the ivory trade has come to flourish once more at the company and in greater China as a whole, bringing much business and prosperity back to the country’s ivory carving houses and businesses.
In recent years leading up to the recently cemented ban, the Chinese government cracked down on the trade in various steps, passing rulings for government-issued certificates with serial numbers, IDs for items over 50 grams, and creating an agreement with the United States in late 2015 pledging to work towards shutting down the trade once and for all.
China is expected to roll out a timetable to implement the new ruling within the next year, with the closure of the 34 processing enterprises and 143 designated trading venues within the nation expected to close doors by March 2017, according to an official at the State Forestry Administration.
