Japan is home to the world’s largest legal domestic market for ivory
The international trade of ivory was banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1990. Even after that, poaching of elephants for ivory in Africa did not stop. As a result, elephants that once widely inhabited the African continent decreased by 70% for savanna elephants and by 90% for forest elephants between 1964 and 2016. To protect elephants from extinction, the 2016 CITES Conference of the Parties passed a resolution recommending the closure of domestic ivory markets. Major ivory-consuming countries around the world have banned the domestic ivory trade, with narrow exceptions. The closure of domestic ivory markets in many countries has led to […]
