Controversial ivory sale to open

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Consignments of illegal ivory are still recovered leaving Africa

The first officially sanctioned sale of ivory in southern Africa for almost a decade opens on Tuesday.

Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe will auction more than 100 tonnes of ivory from stockpiles to buyers from China and Japan.

The money raised will go into elephant conservation projects.

Some environment groups say the sales encourage poachers elsewhere in Africa to kill elephants for ivory that can be fed into the illegal trade.

However, data collected by the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic shows that seizures of illegal ivory fell in the years following the last legal sale in 1999.

We are deeply concerned that these sales will open the floodgates to additional illegal trade Will Travers, Born Free

The secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the UN body that sanctioned the sale, says it will monitor trade in China and Japan to make sure companies are not mixing illegally sourced ivory with these legal shipments.