NEWS
China Leans To Mammoth As Elephant Ivory Dwindles
To sustain a carving and collecting tradition that is centuries old, many Chinese artisans have turned not to ivory from elephants but from the tusks of extinct mammoths harvested from an unlikely place: the melting permafrost of Russia’s Arctic.
While mammoth ivory has been promoted as an ethical alternative, since it does not come from the poaching of live animals, some conservationists argue that the booming trade in it fuels demand for ivory in general. And the mammoth ivory industry, they say, could end up providing legal cover for the black-market trade in elephant ivory.
The legal importation of mammoth ivory, which comes from creatures that vanished more than 3,600 years ago, has skyrocketed in China as dealers and carvers seek a substitute to meet the demand. In the first six months of this year, more than 27 tons of the ivory entered Heilongjiang, the province that borders Russia’s Far East, the government there announced recently. In the same period last year, it was less than four tons. More mammoth ivory funnels in through Hong Kong, where imports are now averaging 34 tons a year, three times the average in 2003, according to one estimate.
The drastic shift in the ivory market, though, is raising a host of concerns that could temper the accolades China won for its plan to phase out commercial sales. The two types of ivory can generally be told apart by their appearance — mammoth ivory is often darker on the outside — and by the pattern of crosshatching. But conservationists worry about anything that could help the elephant ivory trade, which has proved difficult to stamp out.
“As long as there is a legal trade in mammoth, ivory of all kinds can be laundered into it,” said Mark Jones, associate director for policy for the Born Free Foundation, a wildlife conservation organization based in London.
Beyond that, China’s appetite for ivory also appears to be encouraging a shadowy network of traffickers working in Russia. In April, the authorities in Heilongjiang seized a ton of mammoth ivory, including 107 tusks, that a truck driver was smuggling across the border hidden in compartments of a tractor-trailer to evade customs duties. Legal and illegal shipments are believed to flow through Hong Kong, too.
Collecting the tusks like berries or mushrooms on the tundra is allowed in Russia – with a license – but using industrial methods to prospect for buried skeletons is not. But as a photographer from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty documented last year, piracy in Siberia appears unchecked in places, causing untold damage to the environment and washing away the possibility of scientific research that might have been done on the sites to learn more about life on earth millenniums ago.
Ivory’s place in Chinese culture and history will make the trade difficult to squelch entirely. And many here say the craftsmanship involved should be preserved. Prized as “white gold,” ivory has for centuries been considered a symbol of prestige and, as a gift, of honor. It is also an object of veneration and even considered a source of healing. For all those reasons, China long resisted restrictions on ivory.
When the United Nations-backed Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned the sale of elephant ivory, with some exceptions, in 1990, China was given an extra year to comply. In 2008, when the convention allowed a controversial auction of ivory stockpiles amid signs that the herds in Africa were recovering somewhat, China bought 68 tons, while Japan bought nearly 42. That is, officially, China’s only stockpile, and it is dwindling as the ivory is auctioned to factories.
Illegal trade, however, has flourished, as has poaching in Africa. According to an authoritative survey by the International Union for Conservation of Nature last year, 93,000 to 111,000 elephants were lost from 2006 to 2015, the most precipitous decline since the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the ivory ends up in Asia, especially China.
The ban has nonetheless thrown the market into upheaval. In Nanjing, a city of eight million on the lower Yangtze, six of seven retailers closed with the first wave in March. The last one open is the Nanjing Arts & Crafts General Company, a state-run gallery exhibiting all manner of crafts, though for the moment ivory holds center stage in the store’s glass displays.
Mr. Liu said that his store would survive by selling other crafts, but holding an intricately carved ivory sphere containing 21 increasingly smaller, free-moving spheres inside it, he lamented what would be lost with the ban. “A lot of people will stop doing this,” he said.
“There’s a very smooth transition from elephant to mammoth,” one carver, Zheng Kaiwen, said. Since finishing art school in 2007, he has worked only with mammoth, never elephant, he said, adding that he chose it over other materials, like jade, because it “is more expressive.”
“This tradition has been inherited for so many years,” he said, “it is not going to disappear.
