The ivory trade is the buying and selling of elephant tusks, either as raw material or carved into decorative objects, jewelry, and ornaments. While ivory has been traded for centuries, the modern trade is almost entirely illegal and remains one of the biggest threats to elephant survival. An international ban on commercial ivory trade has been in place since 1989, yet demand persists, and tens of thousands of elephants have been killed for their tusks in recent decades.
Where Ivory Comes From
Ivory is the dense, white material that makes up elephant tusks. Both African savanna elephants and African forest elephants are targeted, though Asian elephants (where only males grow tusks) are affected too. Poachers kill elephants to remove their tusks, which are then classified as “raw ivory.” Once carved into figurines, chopsticks, jewelry, or religious objects, it becomes “worked ivory.” A single pair of tusks from a large bull elephant can weigh over 50 kilograms, making individual animals extremely valuable to poaching networks.
Central Africa and East Africa hold the largest remaining elephant populations, and both regions face intense poaching pressure. The ivory is often sourced from multiple countries, consolidated into large shipments, and moved to port cities along Africa’s eastern coast for export.
How Illegal Ivory Moves Around the World
About 70% of the world’s illegal ivory is destined for China, where carved ivory has long been valued as a luxury good and status symbol. Smugglers hide ivory shipments among legal cargo at major export hubs, typically port cities in East Africa. Some shipments pass through Busan, South Korea, where freight agents reportedly take a cut of around $450,000 per shipment to facilitate transit.
Myanmar has also become a significant destination, particularly towns near the Chinese border like Mong La, which cater directly to Chinese demand for worked ivory. African ivory also flows through the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia, often smuggled by boat up the Mekong River. These routes shift constantly as enforcement tightens in one area and traffickers adapt by finding new ones.
The 1989 International Ban
In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) moved African elephants from Appendix II to Appendix I, effectively banning all international commercial trade in elephant products. Under Appendix I, trade is only permitted in “exceptional” circumstances and requires both an export permit (with four strict conditions) and a separate import permit. This resolution is commonly known as “the Ivory Ban.”
The ban had an immediate effect, crashing ivory prices and reducing poaching significantly through the 1990s. One underappreciated factor in its early success: as the ban took hold, mammoth ivory from post-Soviet Russia entered the market as a legal alternative, giving carvers and buyers a substitute that partially absorbed demand.
China’s Domestic Ban and Its Impact
Despite the international ban, domestic ivory markets within individual countries kept demand alive for decades. China’s legal domestic ivory market was the largest in the world until the government shut it down at the end of 2017, closing all licensed ivory carving factories and retail outlets.
The results have been measurable. Research evaluating the ban found that it corresponded with a sharp 50% decrease in elephant poaching and a significant drop in the number of ivory seizure cases globally. Notably, there was no “last-minute rush” of smuggling activity in the period between the ban’s announcement in 2016 and its implementation, suggesting the signal alone helped deter traffickers. Still, demand has not disappeared entirely, and black markets continue to operate both within China and in neighboring countries.
What It Has Done to Elephant Populations
Decades of ivory poaching have pushed both African elephant species into threatened territory. The IUCN Red List now classifies the African forest elephant as Critically Endangered and the African savanna elephant as Endangered. These are separate species, a distinction confirmed by genetic research, and they face different levels of pressure.
Forest elephants have been hit particularly hard. Only about 135,000 remain, with roughly 95,000 of them in Gabon and about 95% of the global population concentrated in Central Africa. While ivory poaching in savannas has declined in recent years, it remains at high levels in forest areas, where dense vegetation makes monitoring difficult and enforcement sparse. Forest elephants also reproduce more slowly than savanna elephants, meaning populations take far longer to recover from losses.
Loopholes That Keep the Trade Alive
Several gaps in regulation make enforcement harder than it might seem. Mammoth ivory, excavated from permafrost in Siberia, is legal to trade internationally because mammoths are extinct and not covered by wildlife protection laws. The problem is that mammoth ivory and elephant ivory look nearly identical, making it easy to pass off illegal elephant tusks as legal mammoth material. This creates a laundering pathway that enforcement agencies struggle to police without laboratory testing.
Antique ivory presents a similar challenge. In many countries, ivory items produced before the ban can still be legally owned and sometimes sold, creating cover for newly poached ivory to enter the market with forged provenance documents. The difficulty of distinguishing old ivory from new ivory without specialized analysis means that legal exceptions become practical loopholes.
Alternatives to Elephant Ivory
For artisans and consumers who value the look and feel of ivory, several substitutes exist. The most notable is the tagua nut, sometimes called “vegetable ivory,” which comes from the ivory palm tree. The nut’s white endosperm can be carved and polished to closely resemble elephant ivory in appearance and texture. Designers have used tagua alongside reclaimed gold, responsibly mined gemstones, and other sustainable materials to create jewelry and decorative objects that replicate the aesthetic without harming wildlife.
Bone, certain types of shell, and high-quality resin have also been used as substitutes, though none match tagua’s resemblance to the real thing. The broader shift in consumer attitudes, particularly among younger buyers in China and Southeast Asia, has also reduced the cultural cachet that ivory once carried, making alternatives more viable as status symbols lose their appeal.