Despite Ban, Rhino Horn Flooding Black Markets Across China
The country is pledged to end the trade in elephant ivory this year, but will it take steps to help save rhinos?
How do you disrupt the illicit rhino horn supply chain from Africa to Asia? That’s the question spurring a new investigation into rhino horn trafficking in China and Vietnam undertaken by the Elephant Action League (EAL), a Los Angeles-based conservation NGO.
Rhinos are being decimated by poaching. In South Africa, home to almost 80 percent of the world’s rhinos, more than a thousand have been slaughtered annually during the past four years. That’s 8,000 percent more than were killed a decade ago, in 2007. Last year rangers in Kruger National Park were called out to stop more than 2,800 incursions by poachers—roughly eight every day.
It has generally been thought that Vietnam is the main market for rhino horn, although
