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SAN FRANCISCO — In response to growing pressure from international law enforcement agencies and conservation groups, eBay, the online auction giant, announced Monday that it would ban all commerce in ivory, including most heirlooms, to avoid providing a market that will encourage the slaughter of endangered elephants.
EBay says it will no longer allow advertisements like this one, for elephant tusks. The ban also extends to most heirlooms.
The announcement, made to the company’s merchants and customers, came as a conservation organization based in Massachusetts prepared to issue the latest in a series of reports documenting how online auction sites, particularly eBay, have become a magnet for trading in items derived from endangered species, among them rare birds and reptiles sold to collectors, ivory-handled walking sticks or bracelets and figurines carved from elephant tusks.
The report, to be released here on Tuesday by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, analyzes data gathered in a six-week survey that tracked more than 7,000 listings of wildlife or their feathers, teeth or pelts offered for sale on more than 185 Web sites in 11 countries. Nearly three-quarters of the items were elephant products, the report said.
The vast majority of the online trade in endangered animals, the report says, is done on eBay. Law enforcement officials and specialists in illegal wildlife trade said it was impossible to determine how much of the estimated $10 billion spent each year in the illicit trade happens online.
Nichola Sharpe, a spokeswoman for eBay, said Monday that the company had been talking about a ban with the federal Fish and Wildlife Service’s enforcement division and conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund. Because of the complications of abiding by multiple and overlapping state, federal and international conservation laws, Ms. Sharpe said, eBay officials decided on the ban, effective Jan. 1.
“It’s just so complicated,” she said. “As we’ve said over the years, we are not experts” in the items bought and sold through the site.
“We don’t have possession of the items,” she said. “We never allow anything illegal to be sold. Where there are complex laws, we work with a number of stakeholders to make sure we are in compliance. That’s especially true with ivory.”
Last year, the company instituted a ban on international sales of elephant ivory products, but Jeffrey Flocken of the animal welfare fund said it “has not worked at all.”
EBay has already banned commerce in guns and digital music, and it is unclear whether the ivory ban will have a noticeable impact on its revenues. The new report from the animal welfare fund said the advertised price for wildlife items offered on the site during the six weeks of the study was $3.87 million and the sales value about $457,000.
The ban may be slow to take effect, suggested Crawford Allan, the North American regional director of Traffic, a subsidiary of the World Wildlife Fund that tracks illegal trade in wildlife.
“It’s not that they are going to turn on a switch and it’s going to end,” Mr. Allan said, pointing out that merchants need only avoid calling their wares “ivory” or using the word “elephant” to avoid automatic filtering. EBay, he said, “does find it difficult to police their own site.”
But at least, he said, “you can’t have people arguing ‘This isn’t elephant ivory.’ ”
The ban, Mr. Allan said, “is the ultimate answer” to that defense.
The use of the Internet for black-market dealings has expanded, experts say, along with the expansion of the legitimate market for ivory, feathers, exotic birds, rare animal hides and parts of rare animals that are used for medicinal purposes. In the United States alone, Mr. Allan said, the value of legal wildlife commerce grew to $2.8 billion in 2007 from $1.2 billion in 2000.
Benito Perez, the head of enforcement for the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has investigators to enforce wildlife protection laws, said Monday, “We’re not strangers to Internet cases.”
The agency’s goal, Mr. Perez said, is to focus not on single sales but on a pattern of questionable commerce that can be traced to a small number of people. His investigators, he said, are pursuing investigations into potentially illicit sales of ivory.
Tight budgets in the enforcement division have led to a decrease in the pool of inspectors — there are 201 as of three weeks ago, down from 238 in 2002. But while enforcement activities have been squeezed, the Bush administration has made significant diplomatic initiatives.
Assistant Secretary of State Claudia A. McMurray told Congress earlier this year that “illegal trade has brought us to a tipping point — in other words, it is pushing many species over the edge to extinction.”
Wildlife experts have documented a precipitous decline in elephant populations, particularly in Africa. In the 1980s an estimated 100,000 elephants a year were being slaughtered, Mr. Flocken said. The worldwide population of elephants stood at an estimated 1.3 million in 1979; by 1989, the number was 450,000. The population has increased slightly since then, he said, to about 470,000.
But the poaching continues. Mr. Allan said that much of the ivory went to the Far East, particularly China and Bangkok, but that some of the Chinese ivory carvers had now set up shop in Africa.
Kuki Gallman, the conservationist who gained wide recognition with her book, “I Dreamed of Africa,” said on Monday from her home in Kenya that within the past two weeks, seven elephants had been found shot by poachers with AK-47s on her 100,000-acre preserve, the Laikipia Nature Conservancy. Several had been shorn of their tusks, but at least two fled the poachers before dying, Ms. Gallman said.
“If you give a value to something,” she said, “there will be someone ready to do whatever possible to get it.”Original here
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