UN:THERE ARE growing fears of a devastating elephant cull in Africa if China is given permission to resume ivory imports as the standing committee of the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) meets in Geneva this week. CLIFFORD COONAN reports from Beijing
The five-day meeting will decide on important measures to protect endangered plants and animals and examine a proposal to allow China to import elephant ivory. It will also assess areas such as Asian tiger farming and the export of mahogany from the Amazon basin.
Environmental groups are furious at the proposal to allow China to import more than 100 tonnes of elephant ivory in a one-off sale of African government stockpiles.
The conservationists say China does not have enough control of its ivory trade, and that allowing legal trade would provide a strong boost to illegal trade in elephant tusks.
Ivory trade was banned in 1989, and since then Cites has overseen the ban, allowing only one-off sales from four African nations - Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe - whose elephant populations were judged to have stabilised.
Only Japan has been approved to buy ivory in these one-off sales, but China now wants approval from the 172 other nations that have signed up to Cites to buy ivory to meet surging demand from the country's burgeoning middle classes for tusks and jewellery.
While Cites says China's enforcement of the laws on illegal trade in ivory is satisfactory, environmental groups say the black market in ivory trade is booming and that China's certification of the origins of its imported ivory is not up to scratch.
The Chinese government has admitted that it lost track of 121 tonnes of ivory that was probably sold on illegal markets.
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) argues that allowing China to import more ivory legally would only lead to additional slaughter of elephants and greater illegal smuggling.
The EIA argues that more than 20,000 elephants a year are killed illegally in Africa and Asia for the ivory black market, and that Chinese nationals have been implicated in illegal ivory seizures in more than 20 African nations.
"China's illegal ivory trade is fuelling a massive new poaching crisis for Africa's elephants. We are calling on the government of China to ban all domestic trade in ivory before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Unless the government of China acts now, African elephants in many countries will once again face extinction," said EIA president Allan Thornton.