Controversial ivory sale to open (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

The first officially sanctioned sale of ivory in southern Africa for almost a decade opens on Tuesday.

Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe will auction more than 100 tonnes of ivory from stockpiles to buyers from China and Japan.

The money raised will go into elephant conservation projects.

Some environment groups say the sales encourage poachers elsewhere in Africa to kill elephants for ivory that can be fed into the illegal trade.

However, data collected by the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic shows that seizures of illegal ivory fell in the years following the last legal sale in 1999.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7693816.stm

They shouldn't be auctioning it -- they should be selling it for a fraction of the going market price, to drive down the value of illegal ivory and discourage poaching.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Controversial legal ivory sale raises $1.2M (CNN)

By CNN's Melissa Gray

(CNN) -- The first officially sanctioned ivory auction in nearly a decade happened Tuesday in Namibia, with opinion split on whether the sale will help or hurt efforts to stop elephant poaching.

The Namibian government sold almost eight tons of ivory for $1.2 million, said Willem Wijnstekers, the secretary-general of CITES, the international agreement covering the trade of endangered species.

Supporters say the auction will provide cash for elephant conservation. Opponents say it will stimulate the demand for ivory.

Buyers came from China and Japan, with the Chinese buying nearly 4.2 tons and the Japanese buying 3.7 tons, said Wijnstekers, who spoke to CNN from the auction in the Namibian capital of Windhoek.

The auctioned ivory consisted of whole elephant tusks and pieces of tusks in various sizes, he said.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/10/28/ivory.auction/index.html

[phantom power]

2. My first thought is, that $1.2M doesn't go very far.

[XemaSab]

3. If it were just Namibia getting the money

that would be 50 cents per person.

Peanuts.