China's ivory dilemma

When 6.1 tons of confiscated ivory was publicly destroyed in South China's Guangdong province on January 6, the international community applauded China's effort to crack down on the illegal ivory trade, which directly or indirectly kills thousands of endangered animals every year.

However, ivory traders in China were not thinking about conservation. Instead they anticipated a rise in the price of ivory, and considered whether it would be the right time to sell.

The result, however, was a disappointment to both sellers and conservationists. The price of ivory didn't budge, which was an ominous sign.

"It proves that the market did not lack inventory, so the price has only fluctuated slightly," said Zhang Di, a senior financial planner based in Shenyang, Liaoning province.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that China sells legal ivory, which provides cover for illegal sales.

White gold

At first, some said that the high-profile destruction of ivory could have cowed potential traders, but one collector, Xu Pengjun, a jade and antique businessman in Shanghai, said this theory did not add up.

"All these years, even though the government tried to crack down on illegal ivory and discourage people from buying it, the price of ivory, legal or illegal, never really fell, because people like it and there is a market and so the price generally climbed," Xu said.

Known among collectors as "white gold," ivory sculptures are seen as both an artistic investment and a commodity such as gold, diamond or jade.

According to Xu, a dragon boat statue carved out of a "whole tusk" of ivory would cost at least 80,000 yuan ($11,567) and the price could be higher depending on the carving techniques.

"Compared to the fluctuating stock and real estate markets, people prefer to invest in ivory products," Zhang said. The high price of ivory products is also a result of the way they are carved, Xu said.

In recent weeks, the price of a raw piece of ivory weighing 20 to 30 grams has been around 900 yuan in Beijing, Zhang said, adding that the price would rise to over 1,000 yuan if it was a machine-carved piece, and over 2,000 yuan if it had been carved by a skilled sculptor.

Scarcity is another reason why people collect ivory products. "When people think there won't be any more in the market, they keep them and wait for the price to surge. But when there is plenty of product, the market stays cool," Xu said.

Legal sales emerge

In 1990, China joined the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) which bans all international ivory trading. But in 2007, CITES approved a stockpile sale and allowed China to join Japan to become a trading partner. The following year at an auction, a total of 102 tons of ivory was purchased by China and Japan from four African countries, thus leading to legal ivory sales.

However, China's 62 tons of ivory slowly entered the market.

So far, only 17.5 tons has actually been sold as legal ivory with the rest remaining in the hands of China National Arts and Crafts, a State-owned enterprise, the Southern Weekly reported in 2011. More recent figures are not available and the company did not respond to the Global Times' queries as of press time.

The buyers of legal ivory, according to a staff member surnamed Zhang from the Beijing Ivory Carving Factory, are usually government departments buying for cultural exhibitions.

Private buyers rarely opt for the legal option and conservationists have slammed the current system.

"The decision by CITES to allow China to engage in legal trade in 2008 was a big mistake," Nigel Hunter of the East African Wild Life Society in Kenya told the Global Times via e-mail.

He said that CITES was warned that measures adopted by China to control the legal trade in China were flawed and that the legal and illegal trade would become intertwined.

Illegal sales take over

In China, every legal ivory product has a certificate and there are now 37 factories and 145 retailers with a State Forestry Administration (SFA) license to deal in ivory products legally.

When a Global Times reporter posed as a buyer in a Beijing antique market near Panjiayuan Road, many shop owners at first said they didn't have ivory products. But later they displayed various carved ivory pieces and raw tusks. Many said the current price of ivory products is at a reasonable level and it is a good time to invest.

"The official ivory tusks are old and not as 'fresh' as the ones we just got from Africa," one shop owner said when asked for a certificate.

When talking about wildlife protection, the shop owners unanimously said that the ivory was not taken by killing elephants. This echoed the findings of an International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) survey which said that 70 percent of Chinese people had no idea that much of the ivory collected came from poaching elephants.

An IFAW investigation in late 2011 inspected 158 factories and found 101 of them were actually legal, of which 59 percent failed to operate legally, because they either used smuggled ivory or did not have a legal certificate. One factory head in Beijing who refused to be named said that the SFA had only granted 60 kilograms of ivory for them to process this year. "Such an amount doesn't satisfy demand and when you consider the fact that legal ivory is expensive, we can't survive with such low profit."

Zhang Li, a zoology professor and member of the CITES program, Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants, said over 17 tons of ivory has been confiscated by the Chinese government since 2011.

But it is an uphill battle. Illegal ivory trading worldwide has doubled since 2007 and China is the world's largest market for ivory. Every 15 minutes an elephant is killed for its ivory, an IFAW report said in December 2013.

But Zhang Wei, dean of the College of Wildlife Resources of the Northeast Forestry University, argued that the point is to crack down on the illegal trade and keep the legal market. "The market demand will exist and we cannot assume the demand will disappear with the trade ban, which will make it go underground," he said, adding that ivory is valuable because it is considered part of traditional Chinese culture.