Market booms for white gold
IT IS a freezing, smog-smothered morning just a few days before Chinese New Year and time is pressing: gifts must be bought, investments made, officials sweetened.
The sumptuous little ivory boutique in Dongfangbobao market is doing a brisk trade.
A sales assistant gently dusts a display comprising a pineapple, a plum and a persimmon: a trio of fruit- themed kitsch carved from the tusks of elephants slain thousands of miles away and sating a Chinese ivory market now way beyond control.
Recent Customs seizures of smuggled ivory, though impressive to the outside world, have barely registered within the trade.
The real volume arrives in containers, hidden among building products and switched through a chain of international ports.
At current black market prices of $4175 per kilo, some investigators believe that China’s increasing links with Africa mean that elephants may be being killed to order.
The licensed ivory shops, along with dozens more like them in the district, make a show of complete legitimacy. Beside each item of ivory is a certificate (including a picture of an elephant) attesting to its unblemished provenance – either made before the global ivory trade ban in 1989 or crafted from tusks drawn down from the 62-tonne stockpile legally bought by China in 2008.
But separate investigations by conservation groups and The Times suggest that, while some shops stick to the rules, at least 60 per cent do not. Many are either fig leaves or facilitators for an ivory black market in China that dwarfs its legal counterpart by a factor of six and where prices have quintupled since 2006.
‘‘You can spend years tracking the process of illegal sales, and buyers may convince themselves that what they are buying is legitimate, but it is all very simple mathematics,’’ said a China-based investigator called Zhao who has been engaged by several non governmental organisations.
‘‘ There should be about five tonnes a year of new product coming into the market from the legal
The legal trade just disguises a black market that everyone plays along with.
stockpile. In reality, the new product flow is many, many times that. The legal trade just disguises a black market that everyone plays along with.’’
In many licensed shops – and in a favourite laundering scam – customers buying certified ivory may be asked whether they would consider a discounted price in exchange for leaving the certification document in the shop. Everyone likes a bargain, and almost everyone agrees to the deal.
The certificates are recycled to disguise the next batch of contraband as licensed ivory.
Fewer than a third of Chinese even know that elephants are killed for their tusks: 70 per cent think they grow back, like fingernails.
For every licensed ivory dealer in Dongfangbobao there are dozens posing as jade and antique dealers who will sell smuggled ivory. Some conceal their activities behind the legal trade in the tusks of longdead Russian mammoths.
The licensed dealers, say researchers at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), are more often than not involved in aspects of the illegal trade.
Beyond the physical market stores is a hum of online ivory trading, its activities hidden in private auction sites.
Estimates vary widely on how much of the ivory sold in the licensed shops is legal and on the overall value of the black market.
But evidence from online auction sites suggests that the market may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with its value doubling every year for the past five.
Supporting all this, say Chinese law enforcement agencies, are international criminal gangs.
‘‘Who has the financial backing to bribe officials in multiple countries, build trucks with false compartments and load containers with huge quantities of building materials?
‘‘There is political power behind them as well,’’ said Grace Gabriel, regional director for IFAW.
Which is one of the reasons, she says, why there is so very little pressure within China to enforce the bans already in place. She describes asking an illegal ivory trader whether it would not be more profitable to move drugs along the same routes. ‘‘He said there was no point: wildlife crime is not seen as a real crime by governments. If he’d been involved in drugs he would have been put away long, long ago.’’
A source at one of China’s 37 licensed carving factories admitted that the raw ivory provided from the stockpile by the Chinese authorities was sufficient only for a single month’s output.
The ivory used in the remaining 11 months is all illegal.
At one end of the illegal ivory trade are African poachers, kitted-out like commando units and harvesting the ‘‘ white gold’’ because raw ivory prices in China become more enticing with every elephant that dies.
At the other are Chinese consumers who see ivory and its long tradition as the perfect gift.
A moribund Shanghai stock market and restrictions on property purchases, say economists, have also channelled ivory into that most fearsome of Chinese categories: the investment vehicle.
Licensed ivory carving factory owners tell NGOs that, for the first time anyone can remember, ivory supply is not meeting demand.
‘‘China regards ivory as a cultural heritage – they are not going to ban it,’’ said Gabriel. ‘‘All we can do now is to push government to crack down on illegal trade.’’