(10 Feb 2017) The decline of Hong Kong's once-flourishing ivory business is set to accelerate even further as plans move ahead to ban domestic ivory trading in the city and in mainland China.
In the ivory carving industry's heyday in the mid-1970s, Hong Kong factories employed as many as 3,500 carvers.
Today however only half-a-dozen part-time carvers are left, along with 10 to 20 full-time mammoth tusk carvers, according to Save the Elephants - thanks to an international ban on trading that was imposed in 1990 that also led to carvers switching from elephant ivory to the tusks of extinct woolly mammoths.
Lai-ngan Wong started carving ivory more than 50 years ago.
Now aged 77, he says the industry is pretty much dead now.
Beijing plans to start shutting China's ivory carving factories and shops by March and ban local sales by the end of 2017.
Hong Kong's blueprint would end local trading by 2021.
Those moves are raising pressure on European countries to do the same.
Researchers say Hong Kong is the world's biggest retail ivory market.
It's also a hub for illicit trading of all sorts of endangered wildlife.
Customs officers make regular busts of illegal shipments of ivory, rhino horns and pangolin scales destined for the Chinese mainland.
The crackdown on ivory is driven by concern over mass slaughter of Africa's elephants to meet demand from China, the world's biggest ivory consumer.
According to one recent study, the continent's savannah elephant population fell 30 percent from 2007 to 2014, to 352,000.
Chinese traditionally have prized ivory carved into bracelets, chopsticks and figurines.
Rising demand from the country's growing middle class has driven up prices, earning it the nickname "white gold."
A one-off auction of African ivory to Japan and China in 2008 also unintentionally helped fuel demand.
Hong Kong has 72 shops whose licenses to sell ivory were obtained before the 1990 ban, according to a 2015 survey by Save the Elephants.
Most buyers are mainland Chinese, who smuggle it back home, it found.
There are also about 450 legally registered ivory traders in the city, the group found.
Activists suspect some traders use their legal stockpiles to "launder" illegal ivory.
They worry that the four-year gap between the enforcement of China's ban and Hong Kong's could encourage this.
The problem "will be even more serious because as China is squeezing out its domestic trade, Hong Kong is still having an open market," said Cheryl Lo, a wildlife crime officer at the World Wildlife Fund.
Traders in mainland China could be targeting Hong Kong to liquidate their stock or to ship it to other markets such as Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, which have fewer restrictions, she said.
Hong Kong's traders say five years is not enough time to sell off their inventory.
They want compensation if they have to give up their 75-ton stockpile of legally registered ivory worth billions of dollars.
Officials have indicated that's not an option.
Wong's employer, Daniel Chan, managing director of Lise Carving and Jewellery, says he doesn't know anything about illegal ivory.
Chan's workshop is filled with hundreds of unsold shrink-wrapped ivory carvings of dragons and Buddha figurines.
Department stores stopped selling Chan's ivory on consignment after protests by conservation groups, he complains.
He denies the ivory industry is responsible for elephant deaths in Africa, despite clear evidence that poaching is the main factor.
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