Ivory Trafficking

The illegal commercial trade in the tusks of elephants and other tusked animals, a trade that has operated across Africa and Asia for hundreds of years, with historical records extending back to the fourteenth century BCE. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species placed the African elephant on its most protective list, Appendix One, in 1989, and the resulting international ivory trade ban took effect in January 1990; the ban is widely credited with sharply reducing the poaching epidemic that had devastated African elephant populations. That epidemic had reached catastrophic scale in the 1980s: the African elephant population across thirty seven range states fell from an estimated 1.3 million in 1979 to only about 600,000 by 1989, with roughly 75,000 elephants killed annually for their ivory during that decade in a trade worth around a billion dollars a year. Despite the ban, ivory trafficking remains entrenched in organized crime, run by international criminal networks operating sophisticated poaching and smuggling operations that persist despite ongoing regulatory efforts.