Bid to Revive Ivory Trade Fails
Even as nations voted to prevent two countries from selling ivory, they denied protections for elephants that would ban the ivory trade.
Johannesburg, South AfricaEfforts to reopen the ivory trade failed Monday at a global wildlife conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Zimbabwe and Namibia had put forward proposals at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a 183-government treaty that regulates the international wildlife trade, but both failed to generate enough votes.
The committee also failed to pass a proposal that would have given all elephants the highest level of international protection, which would effectively permanently ban the ivory trade.
African elephants are facing a poaching crisis. Some 30,000 are killed each year to supply the ivory trade, and the population of savanna elephants has dropped by 30 percent in just seven years, according to
