THE price of ivory has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the last three years, according to research conducted in China and published on Wednesday by the conservation group Save the Elephants.At its peak in 2014 the estimated wholesale price for raw ivory stood at $2,100 per kg on the Chinese black market, but by early 2017 the price had fallen to $730 per kg, according to the report by two ivory trade experts, Esmond Martin and Lucy Vigne.

Chinese demand has driven a decade-long spike in elephant poaching in Africa, where the population has fallen by 110,000 over the last 10 years to just 415,000, according to a recent continental survey. The researchers said China’s economic slowdown, plus a crackdown on corruption which sharply reduced the giving of ivory trinkets as gifts to officials, had also crimped demand, alongside a growing awareness of the catastrophic consequences of the ivory trade for elephants. In the past, said Save the Elephants founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton, “few Chinese associated ivory products with elephant death”, but a series of campaigns had helped inform the public.

International trade in ivory was banned in 1989, yet poaching continued and accelerated in recent years, feeding a black market fuelled by corruption and controlled by criminal gangs. The researchers said that as China’s legal ivory market has contracted, illegal markets in Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam have boomed. of customers” crossing the border from China.

Douglas-Hamilton said it was a critical but hopeful moment for elephants. “With the end of the legal ivory trade in China, the survival chances for elephants have distinctly improved,” he said. “The future of the African elephant is in the hands of China. There is still a long way to go to end the excessive killing of elephants for ivory, but there is now greater hope for the species,” he added.

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2017