MONTPELIER, Vt. – Supporters of a proposed ban on the sale of ivory and rhinoceros horns in Vermont are upset by a move to insert exemptions into the legislation for old pianos and other antiques.
Vermont activist Ashley McAvey told a state legislative committee Thursday that permitting any sales of the materials will encourage the international market that is funding terrorist groups and contributing to the likely extinction of African elephants. Both elephants and rhinos are poached for their ivory.
But committee Chairman David Deen says many are questioning the link between their grandmother's piano and terrorism.
Fox News has attempted to give this a terrorist frame by suggesting that the
ivory trade funds terrorist groups but the reality is that the entire supply chain and the consumers and collectors are complicit. Exemptions might be made for pre-1970s objects, but isn't that the point, an auction/resale market that enables the entire rent-seeking market, of which
the US is the second largest replete with loopholes and enforcement issues. NY State's
2014 ivory trafficking law has resulted in a logical reaction from the classes who can afford such finished items.
“The legislation would impact antiques and auctions, all of that, and we are willing to have, and we have had, some discussions with the folks who are involved in those activities, and they’re telling us how they operate and what we need to do, and we are also getting information from the enforcement folks at U.S. Fish and Wildlife and New York DEC that there are some bad actors out there in both the auction houses and the dealers who aren’t doing the right thing, who are certifying the ivory is antique ivory when it is not antique ivory.
“Most of the activity by its nature is occurring in New York City because that’s where you have the auction houses, antique dealers, and that’s where you have many of the museums. That is where most of the illegal ivory is being imported into. It’s stuck in shipping containers, and it’s brought over, and obviously having limited resources, the federal folks, unless they get a tip that it’s in a container somewhere, they don’t know that it’s there, so it gets into the country, and then some shady dealer signs a certificate saying its antique ivory, and the next thing you know, bingo, it’s legal,” said (Assemblyman Robert K.) Sweeney.
Christie’s opposes the proposed legislation because it “would go well beyond what is needed to stop the slaughter of elephants for illegal elephant ivory and would end the legal and legitimate trade of antiquated objects containing ivory.”
Attempts to incentivize market regulation by attempting to drive the price down by creating government stockpiles from cornering existing stocks in 2008 resulted in failure as China's economic expansion only increased demand with an upsurge in 2012. And the origin of ivory, whether Africa or Asia has been little enforced as well as the transshipment market has continued legally and illegally. "In 2014, Uganda said that it was investigating the theft of about 3,000 pounds of ivory from the vaults of its state-run wildlife protection agency. Poaching is very much acute in central Africa, and is said to have lost at least 60 percent of its elephants in the past decade"
Efforts to kill poaching at the source of the resource have shown the need for serious international drone deployment and enforcement. And complicating market regulation is that there are an estimated 10 million mammoths still buried in Siberia, imagining new sources for Russian kleptocratic state capital "In the early 19th century mammoth ivory was used, as substantial source, for such products as piano keys, billiard balls, and ornamental boxes."
Link: Wildlife crime