Myanmar's ivory trade challenges China's efforts to save African elephants

Myanmar's flourishing African ivory smuggling is putting immense pressure on China's effort to enforce a domestic ban on ivory trade, a report released by Save the Elephants revealed.

Researchers found around 51 shops openly displaying 14,846 ivory items for sale in Myanmar's Mong La, Mandalay, Yangon, Tachileik and Bagan cities.

 At Mong La, a town located on the notorious Golden Triangle, “the illegal ivory trade soared by a 63 percent increase in last three years,” the report said.

The Golden Triangle bisects the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong Rivers, bordering Myanmar, Laos and southern China, and is the second largest hub for cross-border smuggling of drugs in the world, according to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The report titled “Myanmar's Growing Illegal Ivory Trade with China” reveals the booming ivory product sales at Mong La in the last few years, which has replaced Tachileik on the Thailand border as the place with the largest number of illegal worked ivory items.

Vendors selling carved ivory items, according to the report, stated that Chinese customers buy about 90 percent of what they sell.

Myanmar has more than 5,000 captive elephants, the largest captive elephant population in the world. The existing laws in the country allow trade of ivory procured from licensed elephants that have naturally died.

However, researchers found over a third of the ivory items available in Mong La shops were of African elephants.

“Rampant African ivory smuggling in Myanmar has put a lot of pressure on Chinese law enforcement agencies to ensure effective domestic ban on ivory. Awareness about the ivory ban along Golden Triangle region and a strict law enforcement are required to stop this brutal trade,” Lucy Vigne, a lead author of the report told CGTN.

“The authorities in Myanmar are not deterring ivory smugglers and trade in ivory and other endangered wildlife products that are running riot to meet the continued Chinese demand. This is against the international norms,” she added.

In a bid to control illegal cross-border activities, the Chinese government closed the official border crossing from China into Mong La in 2010.

The Chinese mainland banned the domestic trade of ivory, early this year, in an effort to control poaching in African countries. Its regions including Hong Kong and Taiwan enacted similar laws to combat the illegal ivory trade.

In Myanmar's illegal ivory market, researchers also saw intricate carvings and figurines that appeared to have been smuggled in from China where sales are now banned.

More than 20,000 African elephants are killed every year to satiate global demand for ivory. “Despite a great political commitment from the Chinese government and the moral leadership of influential citizens it will take continued united action to end the issue,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants.

“China's new laws have to be rigorously enforced, borders must be controlled, and everyone must be made aware of the terrible consequences of buying ivory,” he suggested.
Myanmar government, alarmed with the unprecedented increase in wildlife trade, burned seized ivory tusk and other wildlife products on Thursday in a bid to deter the smugglers.

“We know that over 20 countries around the world destroy illegal wildlife parts in this way. We want to wipe out the illegal market and let people know that if they trade unlawful items, they will be seized and destroyed," U Win Naing Thaw, director of Myanmar's Nature and Wildlife Conservation Department told Cambodia Times.

Esmond Martin, co-author of the report, and a conservationist known for his investigative work on ivory and rhino horn trade was murdered in Kenya in February this year.

Please credit and share this article with others using this link:https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514e7a4d6a4e7a457a6333566d54/share_p.html

Myanmar is the new illegal ivory market for African elephants, says report

Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation of more than 100 ethnic groups, bordering India, Bangladesh, China, Laos and Thailand is now the new growing market for ivory trade. This is according to a new report by ivory trade specialists Lucy Vigne and the late Esmond Martin, which shows that one town in particular in Myanmar, Mong La - a frontier town in the notorious Golden Triangle on the border of China - has experienced a ‘prolific growth’ in ivory trading. Myanmar is facing an unprecedented elephant-skinning epidemic that threatens to wipe out its wild elephant population in a matter of years. The number of new ivory items seen for sale in the town grew by 63 per cent in three years, and now accounts for over a third of the ivory seen in the country. This new study shows the scale of the challenge that remains for elephants in the face of the ivory trade. The report ‘Myanmar’s Growing Illegal Ivory Trade with China’, a publication by Save the Elephants(STE) released on Tuesday 2, 2018 in Nairobi recounts how Chinese visitors smuggle worked ivory from Mong La back home with little concern about getting caught. “This ivory has often come up the Mekong River into the lawless eastern periphery of Myanmar where it is for sale in both retail and bulk. The wholesale price for African raw ivory in late 2017 in the Golden Triangle region has remained stable at about USD 770(Sh77,000) to USD 800(Sh80,000) per kg since late 2015,”said Ms Vigne, the lead author of the report. Know if news is factual and true. Text 'NEWS' to 22840 and always receive verified news updates. Myanmar is said to have the largest captive, or ‘domestic’, elephant population in the world with over 5,000 individuals. However, the “Traders there say that the internal ivory trade is legal for trimmed domestic elephant tusk tips and from licensed animals that have died, and operate accordingly,” added Vigne. This is going on despite trading in the tusks of the remaining wild elephants in Myanmar – numbering perhaps 2,000 – is acknowledged to be illegal. The ivory from captive elephants is used for local carving and retail sale especially in Mandalay and Yangon. Their tusks are also sold wholesale in Mandalay to Chinese traders, who smuggle them across the China border in contravention of the existing international ivory trade ban. Traders reported that 90 per cent of buyers were Chinese wishing to smuggle the ivory home, as also found by the same authors in market surveys in Hong Kong (2015) and Laos (2017).In Vietnam (2016) this was estimated to be 75 per cent. “Poaching is a problem for elephants in Myanmar but the country also provides a largely unchecked conduit for illegal African ivory carved in the region to be smuggled into China, in violation of International Law. The authorities are not deterring ivory smugglers and trade in ivory and other endangered wildlife products that is running riot to meet the continued Chinese demand,” said Vigne. The researchers cited five towns and cities (of eight visited) with 51 shops openly displaying 14,846 ivory items for sale. These were Mong La, Mandalay, Yangon, Tachileik and Bagan. In Mong La, ten open Chinese shops were counted, nearly all specialising in selling ivory, displaying 5,279 recently-made ivory items. According to Ian Douglas-Hamilton, founder STE, many of the DNA tests done on the ivories that have been arrested prove that most of them come from Africa. “Most of the DNA results of the ivories seized and tested at since 2006 from University of Washington Centre for Conservation Biology shows that they now come from Africa especially from DRC Congo, Tanzania with Mombasa port being the exit point. Kenya currently is doing well since the ban of ivory trading and thanked community conservancies for improving the conservation of elephants and other wildlife,” said Hamilton. Hamilton is calling upon China to close its market to stop fueling demand from Myanmar and asked for more collaboration between countries and agencies involved in stopping illegal wildlife trade. The international trade in elephant ivory has been illegal since 1989 yet African elephant numbers continue to decline. In 2016 the International Union for Conservation of Nature cited ivory poaching as a primary reason for the staggering loss of around 111,000 elephants between 2005 and 2015 – leaving their dwindling total numbers at an estimated 415,000.

Please credit and share this article with others using this link:
https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001297596/myanmar-is-the-new-illegal-ivory-market-for-african-elephants-says-report

Raids reveal Myanmar poachers’ indiscriminate bloodthirst

A series of targeted raids by Forestry Department agents on Tuesday ended with the arrest of six poachers Mandalay, Ayeyawady, and Bago regions and the seizure of a vast array of wildlife products. The diversity of the haul offered a glimpse into the voracious bloodthirst of Myanmar poachers and their customers.

Among the seized items were elephant hides, antlers of numerous deer species, bison horns, turtle shells and flesh, porcupine quills, bear bones, claws, and paws, and skulls of a variety of wild animals.

“Due to the market demands of neighboring countries, there are many people storing and trading these [wildlife parts],” Ayeyawady Region Forestry Department director Khin Maung Myint, told the Myanmar Times. He explained that one facility that was raided in his jurisdiction was used for making decorative hangings, jewelry and accessories, and traditional medicines out of animal skins and other parts.

The six suspects have been charged under Myanmar’s Protection of Wildlife and Protected Areas Law, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years for the killing or wounding of a protected animal.


Research from the last year has showed a spike in elephant killings as demand for elephant skin has risen across the region. Whereas ecological damage from the ivory trade has been limited by regulations in China and by its specific targeting of elephants with tusks, elephant skin hunters are indiscriminate in their killings, and skin products, which often lose their resemblance to natural elephant skin after they are processed, are more difficult to detect.



Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation reported last year that poachers in Myanmar kill one elephant every week. If the killing continues at the same rate, the country’s elephant population could be extinct within a few years.


Please credit and share this article with others using this link:
https://coconuts.co/yangon/news/raids-reveal-myanmar-poachers-indiscriminate-bloodthirst/