Singapore to ban ivory trade from 2021

Anyone violating the domestic trade in ivory and ivory products will then face up to a year in prison and fines. Singapore's government announced this on Monday.

The international ivory trade had already been banned by the government back in 1990. However, traders could sell their products domestically if they could prove that these had been imported before 1990.

Large seizure at customs

In July, the largest quantity of smuggled ivory to date was seized in the Southeast Asian city-state. Customs officials found a total of 8.8 tonnes of tusks in a container. The ivory came from around 300 African elephants. The container came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was to be shipped via Singapore to Vietnam.

As the BBC reported, the discovered tusks have an estimated value of 12.9 million US dollars. Also seized were 11.9 tonnes of pangolin scales, said to belong to 2’000 mammals.

The worldwide trade in ivory has, with a few exceptions, been banned since 1989. The number of African elephants had fallen from several million to around 600’000 between the middle of the 20th century and the end of the 1980s.

The ban is in force – and the EU followed suit

The announced ban came into force as planned in September 2021: since then, the domestic ivory trade has been prohibited in Singapore, with violations punishable by up to one year in prison and fines. Just a few months later, in December 2021, the European Union also tightened its rules considerably. The EU Commission largely suspended the trade in raw ivory on the EU market and also restricted the trade in worked ivory objects to strict exceptional cases. Despite these international tightenings, elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade remain at a high level: according to estimates, between 20,000 and 30,000 African elephants continue to be poached each year.