Elephant tusks, jewelry, statuettes and even a mahjong game: 1,850 tons of ivory were crushed and then burned in Reims (northern France) on Tuesday, two-thirds of which were voluntary donations from about 90 people, the rest came from confiscations, an AFP photographer noted .
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This ivory, whose volume corresponds to the tusks of about “180 elephants”, makes this operation, organized jointly with the French Office for Biodiversity, the largest destruction ever carried out at the initiative of Ifaw France, a branch of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, an NGO with French headquarters in Reims.
AFP
Previous operations of this type took place in Reims in 2015 (32 kilos) and in 2018 simultaneously in Reims (510 kilos) and Nice (600 kilos).
The aim is to “symbolically show that ivory only has value for elephants,” emphasized the director of Ifaw France, David Germain-Robin. “Today there are fewer than 500,000 elephants in Africa and Asia combined, or less than 1% of the original populations,” a decline largely due to hunting and then poaching, he lamented.
AFP
Certain pieces destroyed this Tuesday are “magnificent objects” and their destruction could “cause incomprehension,” noted Loïc Obled, deputy director general of the French Biodiversity Office. But “since ivory is not legal, we want to take it off the market to dry up that market.”
The objects were crushed by a quarry operator and then burned at a nearby location.
AFP
The fund launched the “I Give My Ivory” campaign in 2015. In France, elephant ivory cannot generally be sold legally. Exceptions mainly concern carved ivory pieces from before 1947, which must have a special certificate issued by the state.
AFP
“The recent drastic restrictions on the ivory trade in China, the US and Europe offer a glimmer of hope for the last giants,” said David Germain-Robin. “Unfortunately, ivory continues to circulate illegally, particularly through online sales sites.”
AFP
“Environmental crime is one of the biggest in the world. The ivory trade brought a lot of money to certain terrorist groups in Africa,” he recalls.
In general, the illegal wildlife trade generates sales of up to $23 billion per year, making it one of the most lucrative activities in the world, behind drug trafficking, counterfeiting and human trafficking, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.