2023-11-28 23:55:00
On Tuesday, November 28, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the French Biodiversity Office (OFB) organized the destruction of 1.8 tons of ivory in Reims to help curb its trade.
Elephant tusks, jewelry, statuettes, raw or worked, in sets or bracelets, ivory is used to produce “magnificent objects”, deadly for elephants. The 1,800 kilos of objects we are talking about here, equivalent to the tusks of around 180 elephants, were first crushed, then incinerated, under the control of a bailiff.
For the two non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it is a question of acting “on trafficking responsible for the death of thousands of elephants each year”. The action “symbolically shows that ivory only has value for elephants”, underlined the director of IFAW France, David Germain-Robin.
As reported by AFP, today there are only 400,000 elephants left in Africa, a decline of 70% compared to the 1970s, mainly due to poaching.
Ultimately, their commitment aims to definitively put an end to the ivory trade, already regulated but still illegally prolific. For this, the IFAW launched a campaign in 2015 called “I give my ivory” to encourage individuals to hand over their objects in order to destroy them. “By ethical conviction or lack of being able to sell them legally following the latest changes in regulations”, many individuals have turned to the association.
“The quantity of objects collected above all shows the importance of perpetuating in the future a secure system for collecting and destroying ivory, supported by the State,” insist the OFB and IFAW. For the moment, these collections exclude objects of “high, cultural, artistic or historical importance”, which can be housed in museums, for example.
#NGOs #burn #tonnes #ivory #Reims #stem #trade