Legalising the trade of rhino horn and elephant ivory would not stop poaching and illegal trading, and would instead increase the demand for endangered animal products, the head of the Environmental Investigation Agency has said.

EIA executive director Mary Rice said suggestions to introduce a regulated international market were simply “academic postulating” - and in practice, would make it much harder to detect and prosecute illegal trading.

Speaking at a debate organised by environmental research organisation Earthwatch at the Royal Geographical Society on 17 October, Rice said: “Legal trade is not the solution for the long term survival of elephants and rhinos in the wild. “Opening markets without fully understanding the impact of these markets is extremely high risk - and even if it is just slightly off the mark, it is irreversible.”

She also said allowing legal trade would muddy the waters - making it impossible to tell whether rhino horn or ivory had come from a legal source or not.

“How do you tell that the powdered rhino horn you have been offered is legal? If a product is banned, everyone knows it is illegal. It seems to make perfect sense to me that a ban is more straightforward and clear cut.”

The debate followed lobbying from some conservationists and private rhino farmers for the member countries of The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to drop the current agreement to ban rhino horn, elephant ivory and tiger bone and skin.

Opponents of the ban believe it has failed to reduce illegal trading in countries like South Africa, or quell the demand for ivory, horn, bone and skin for use as traditional medicine and ornaments in China, Vietnam and Thailand.

But Rice said allowing legal trading would mean more people would buy the products, as they would no longer be put off by the products’ illegal status.

“It would expand markets,” Rice said. “Can you imagine what would happen if tiger parts were in shopping malls across China?”

She also said lifting the CITES ban would not just affect South Africa, but would have consequences in India, Nepal and Botswana - where she believed bans have been effective.

“One of the key reasons why bans are not as effective as they should be is because they are not enforced and not implemented. Bans work when they are implemented properly.”

She accepted that poaching was already policed extensively in South Africa and that products were regularly seized in South East Asia, but said there was still a lack of attention to what was happening in the “middle place” between the two.

She added that the illegal trade in animal products was not policed anywhere near as rigorously as other international forms of serious organised crime, such as the drug trade and human trafficking.

But other speakers on the panel said South Africa had exhausted all other options - and legalisation had to be considered as an alternative to the trade ban.

Dr Duan Biggs, research fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at Australia’s University of Queensland, said the ban was doing nothing to stop the poaching and killing of rhinos in Kruger National Park South Africa, where he grew up.

“Anti-poaching efforts in Kruger now involve the national army and the police. My home has turned into a war zone,” he said. “The current strategy of persisting with the trade ban on rhino horn is clearly failing.

“The strengthening of enforcement has led to increased poaching. We need to consider a better range of approaches to get the outcomes that we all want.”

He said the practice of farming rhinos would be a safe, effective and humane way of yielding rhino horn to meet the demands of markets in countries such as China and Vietnam.

“One does not have to kill a rhino to get its horn,” he said. “You can get eight times as much horn by regularly trimming the horn as from killing the animal. There is minimal risk to rhinos and they continue living as normal.

“Without this, you end up with the unnecessary killing of rhino. After poachers have removed their horns, animals are left to bleed to death.”

He said criminals earned £300 million per year from illegal trading of rhino horns - and under legal trading, this money could go towards conservation.

“Legal trade could provide conservation and would provide societal benefits - it would create jobs in low income countries.

“We are not saying that legalising trade is a silver bullet - but based on rigorous research, legal and regulated trade can be considered as one of the possibilities for conservation of rhinos.”

The debate, chaired by BBC journalist Martha Kearney, was attended by more than 700 at the venue - with more than 300 taking part online.

An audience poll at the end of the evening showed the majority of the room rejected the proposal to lift the ban - though there was also significant support for the idea.