China and Japan bid for more than 100 tonnes of stockpiled elephant ivory from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe

This article is more than 11 years old

This article is more than 11 years old

Namibia has sold more than seven tonnes of ivory for $1.1m (£703,000) in the first sale of elephant ivory for nearly a decade which began today in southern Africa.

Namibia, along with South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, has been taking part in a UN-sanctioned auction of more than 100 tonnes of stockpiled elephant ivory that is being sold exclusively to Japan and China.

Namibia's deputy environment minister, Leon Jooste, said three buyers from Japan and three from China bought 7.2 tonnes for a total of $1.18m during the closed-door auction.

"We had nine tonnes on offer, but the remaining 1.8 tonnes will be utilised by local jewellers and carvers," he said.

The one-off sale was agreed in July at a meeting of the UN body the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).

Under the deal, the two countries can bid for up to 108 tonnes of ivory which has been collected from culls and natural deaths and will be used in the traditional ivory carving trade.

Both countries will be monitored by Cites to ensure that companies are not mixing illegally sourced ivory with the legal shipments. China and Japan are not permitted to export the material, and it is a condition of any sale that money raised will go to conservation projects to support elephants and community conservation and development programmes.

The issue of ivory sales is contentious. The international trade in elephant ivory was banned by Cites in 1989, but since then trading has been permitted for certain large elephant populations. Last week, eBay banned all trading in ivory on its online auction website.

Conservation bodies have warned that sales of ivory could encourage illegal poaching.

The Environmental Investigation Agency's campaigns director, Julian Newman, said of today's auction: "Cites' own comprehensive international monitoring system for tracking illegal elephant products, has shown a steady increase in ivory seizures – driven by a rising demand for ivory.

"This coupled with a lack of sufficient checks in importing countries such as China and instability in some African range states, could easily drag us back to the dark and bloody days of the 1980s when we were seeing around 200 elephants killed by poachers a week."

The International Fund for Animal Welfare elephants programme director, and former director of Kenya Wildlife Service, Michael Wamithi, said: "Allowing this exorbitant amount of ivory to flood the market, considering the level of elephant poaching occurring today, is just plain irresponsible.

"Developing countries persistently bear the brunt of escalating Asian markets. By permitting legal trade in ivory, we are only encouraging the laundering of illicit ivory, thereby increasing illegal hunting activities by poachers."

Chinese authorities were forced to prove that the country had put in place sufficient measures to regulate sales and crack down on the illegal domestic ivory trade before it was approved as a buyer earlier this year.

Japan was already an approved buyer following a one-off experimental sale in 1999. This prompted a number of conservation groups to claim that the sale had significantly increased the killing of elephants in Africa.

But Traffic, an organisation founded by WWF and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that monitors the illegal ivory trade, said there was no evidence of a link between the sale and illegal trading.

The auction will continue until November 8.