The illegal ivory trade: Hong Kong moves centre stage in seeking to beat the business
Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s recent commitment on the issue heartens those campaigning for an end to the US$19 billion trade
It was an ordinary hot and humid Tuesday for customs officers at Hong Kong International Airport on June 10, 2014 until they discovered a record haul of elephant tusks.
Half a dozen hacked-up tusks wrapped in layers of aluminium foil and towels were found in an unassuming carry-on bag on a transit flight from Angola, en route to Cambodia.
Officers seized 31 other bags from the same flight with the same contents, amounting to a total seizure of 790kg of raw tusks and semi-finished ivory products valued at HK$7.9 million.
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Sixteen Vietnamese nationals, aged 20 to 54, six of them women, were charged and later jailed for six months – lenient given that anyone found guilty of importing an endangered species without a licence can face a maximum of two years in prison.
An ocean away, Kenyan conservationists were still mourning the loss of Satao. Just two weeks before the big Hong Kong bust, the 45-year-old bull, one of the continent’s best known and loved elephants, was found dead in Tsavo national park, killed by a poisoned arrow, his faced hacked off and impressive tusks gone.
Kenyan officials believe up to 100 elephants were killed that year to June, but the figure is widely seen as an underestimate by conservationists.
A Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) report last year estimated a 38 per cent drop in African elephant numbers from over 166,000 in 2006 to just over 102,000 in 2013 primarily because of poaching, habitat loss and land-use changes.
And while no one can ever prove that Satao’s tusks were in those carry-on bags seized at Hong Kong airport, one indisputable fact among conservationists is that the city remains an epicentre of the international trade in illicit ivory – an industry worth an estimated US$19 billion that probably leads to 30,000 elephants being killed every year.