Hong Kong’s ivory traders don’t deserve any compensation

Alex Hofford is outraged by the demand from the 370 Hong Kong companies and individuals who will be affected by a trade ban, given their role in decimating elephant populations in the first place

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An aerial view of a dead, poached elephant in a national park in South Sudan. Photo: AFP/Wildlife Conservation Society

Published: 11:36am, 25 Mar 2016Updated: 11:36am, 25 Mar 2016

Twenty-six years ago, the world called time on the international trade in elephant ivory, after it had halved African elephant populations within 15 years. Now governments in the US, China and Hong Kong are finally closing the remaining loophole that allowed domestic trade to continue and facilitated a second ivory crisis that has recently been claiming 33,000 elephants a year.

Hopefully, Japan, Thailand and other significant markets will soon follow suit and the elephants can recover. The positive news is that ivory prices have more than halved in China over the past 18 months, that drop apparently starting before the domestic trade bans were announced. Ivory traders at the Hong Kong Trade Development Council’s jewellery fair this month offered us ivory for US$380 a kilogramme, down to 20 per cent of what it was.

In January, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying announced in his annual policy address a plan to phase out the local ivory trade. Amazingly, some traders in Hong Kong are calling for compensation for not being able to continue to sell ivory. This would be totally wrong, if not immoral, given the pivotal role of these traders in stockpiling and bending the rules to create the ivory crisis in the first place. It would be like compensating people for knowingly selling stolen goods, because the law had caught up with them.

Tourists feed freshly picked grapes to 40-year-old elephant Boonruen at a vineyard in Hua Hin, Thailand. African nations, meanwhile, have lost millions in tourism revenue and spent millions fighting poaching. Photo: EPA

Carving out a better future for elephants in the fight against wildlife trafficking

Instead of rewarding those who invested and speculated in extinction and whose abuse of regulations halved elephant populations, surely it is the families of the many rangers killed by poachers, or the child victims of civil wars financed by ivory – or the African nations that have lost millions in tourism revenue and spent millions fighting poaching – who should be compensated by the traders whose activities caused the problem? They won’t be, of course, and that’s why its morally offensive that the perpetrators of the elephant slaughter should even suggest that they be compensated.

Industries of all kinds fall into disfavour and become obsolete for moral, legal and economic reasons and almost none, if any, are compensated. Why should the 370 companies and individuals in Hong Kong that have had 26 years’ notice to sell down their stocks get special treatment? When foot binding was banned, did we compensate foot binders? Were slave owners compensated when that abominable practice was abolished? Of course not.