Ivory stockpile to be publicly destroyed as Obama seeks to end illegal trade
TV cameras to record smashing of tusks and intricately carved items – but African elephants are already on brink of extinction
On 14 November, at
Barack Obama's instruction, and in front of visiting dignitaries and television cameras, every last intricately carved and high-dollar item will be fed into the jaws of an industrial strength rock-crushing machine and smashed to splinters.
The hope is that this public act of destruction will serve as a turning point. White House officials and
conservation groups calculate that demonstrating the president's commitment to breaking up the illegal ivory trade will persuade other governments to take similar measures, and help put the
wildlife traffickers on the run.
But it may be too late. Two decades after an international ban on ivory sales, an explosion in wildlife trafficking has once again brought African elephants to the brink of extinction. Nearly 100 African elephants are killed every day for their tusks to feed a huge demand for ivory trinkets from newly wealthy buyers in Asia who see ivory as a status symbol.
US security officials say the global trade in illegal ivory has grown to $10bn (about £6.2bn) a year – just behind drugs and human trafficking. The huge profit potential has also turned ivory into an important line of financing for terrorist networks such as al-Shabaab, the al-Qaida affiliate that carried out
September's attack on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi.
"This is not the kind of poaching that we have dealt with in the past," said Dan Ashe, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency leading the US fight against wildlife trafficking. "It's syndicated and sophisticated criminal organisations that are driving the trade."
The grisly results are visible in the vast storehouse outside Denver – ordinarily off-limits to the public – where six ton of ivory seized by US law enforcement officials over the past 25 years is heaped among stuffed tigers, caiman ashtrays, and other artifacts of the
illegal wildlife trade.
The smuggled ivory was seized by US agents at airports and cargo ships, hidden in the false bottoms of suitcases and shipping crates, buried in jars of face cream, or disguised by being stained dark brown with tea. Some of the ivory – the big display case of bracelets – made it as far as a jewellery shop off Times Square in New York city, before it was seized by agents.
"There could be several hundred elephants represented on this pallet alone," said Bernadette Atencio, the supervisor of the US Fish and Wildlife repository.
America is one of the top destinations of illegal ivory from
Africa, as well as an important transhipment point for the carved ivory trinkets bound ultimately for the leading markets in China, Japan, Thailand and other Asian countries.
But the six-tonne haul is only half that seized in China this week alone – 3,1888 pieces of elephant tusks were found in Xiamen city, with an estimated value of 603m Yuan ($99m or £62m) on the black market. The sheer volume of trade is depleting populations of African adult male elephants, Atencio said, reaching for a polished tusk, carved with renderings of the "big five" in African game.
"I think the baby tusks are the most heartbreaking," she said. "What I see here are lost generations of elephants, many many generations of elephants that will never be because these elephants were not allowed to mature and to reach an adult size.
President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya (holding stick) sets ablaze a pile of illegally trafficked elephant tusks at Tsavo West National Park. Photograph: Dai Kurokawa/EPA
By ordering the destruction of the ivory haul in Denver, American officials hope to send a definitive message to traffickers that the bottom is about to fall out of the ivory trade, and that there is no use hanging on to stores of ivory, because it will eventually end up being destroyed.
The strategy
has been endorsed by leading conservation groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, and wildlife officials in Kenya and other states which depend on African elephants for their tourism industries.
"It does send a signal that ivory is not going to be a good investment for very much longer," said Allan Thornton, who heads the
Environmental Investigation Agency.
