China, the world’s biggest consumer of illegal ivory, crushed six tons of tusks and carved ornaments in public Monday, in an event that signaled it would do more to join global efforts to protect African elephants from rampant poaching.
About 25,000 of the estimated 500,000 elephants in Africa are illegally slaughtered each year for their tusks, conservationists say. It is a $10 billion industry that draws in global crime syndicates and African rebel groups, and threatens to wipe out elephants from parts of the continent within a decade.
Although Chinese authorities have stepped up anti-trafficking efforts in recent years, the trade in illegal ivory has continued, in part because many Chinese people do not know elephants have to die for the ivory to be taken.
On Monday, workers in overalls fed scores of weighty tusks and hundreds of small, intricately carved objects into a large, noisy green crushing machine in front of a crowd of officials, diplomats, conservationists and journalists in this small town just outside the southern city of Guangzhou.
“We also hope this event will raise the public awareness of conservation and intensify the responsibilities of enforcement agencies,” said Zhao Shucong, director of the State Forestry Administration. Zhao admitted that ivory smuggling was “still raging” and said that China was “in urgent need of sincere collaboration with different countries and international organizations” to support elephant conservation.
Past efforts to curb ivory poaching have at times disintegrated into finger-pointing between officials in Africa — where corruption and weak law enforcement have allowed poachers to prosper — and countries such as China, where most of the ivory ends up.
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