Ivory Bill

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 4th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and I strongly endorse much of what he said. This Bill is pure good news, which is a very rare thing in Parliament, from my short experience. I thank the Secretary of State for being true to his word and actually delivering the Bill, having promised that he would do so.

The situation today is desperate. As we have heard, every 25 minutes, an elephant is killed for its tusks. That is 20,000 elephants a year. There has been a 90% collapse in the elephant population in the last century. Notwithstanding the leadership that this country has undoubtedly shown in recent years, the UK has historically been a very big part of the problem. According to TRAFFIC, it is estimated that the amount of ivory equivalent to that from more than 1 million elephants was transported from Africa to the UK between 1860 and 1920. As we have heard, we are still significant exporters of ivory today.

We are on the brink of losing forever the world’s most iconic species—a sentient, highly intelligent animal. And we are not doing it for any justifiable or noble reason; we are doing it so that a few people can have trinkets. It is a brutal, barbaric business that directly funds some of the most abhorrent organisations on the planet today. In the case of al-Shabaab, the organisation responsible for the appalling events in the shopping mall in Nairobi six years ago, it is estimated that 40% of its funding comes from the ivory trade. We know that, where poaching happens, it enriches the worst possible people, but it also destabilises and impoverishes whole communities.

We also know that bans work. In 1989, we had a worldwide ban approved by CITES and immediately poaching levels fell dramatically—as did, by the way, the price and the value of ivory. Tragically, 10 years later, after suspicious levels of lobbying, so-called one-off sales were allowed, and the market was flooded with legal ivory, in turn making it easier for traders to launder illegal ivory. That is exactly why the Bill that we are passing today—I very much hope we are passing it—is so important. If it is passed, we will have introduced one of the toughest ivory bans in the world.

That is fantastic news but, at the risk of sounding churlish, I want to make a few minor suggestions. First, I very much hope that the Bill is passed—I am speaking more quickly as the great Secretary of State departs the Chamber; I hope that he catches this point—before the illegal wildlife trade conference in October, because otherwise we will lack the authority that we are going to need in order to be able to ask other countries to do their bit, and we will need to ask a lot of other countries to do a great deal.

Secondly, the ban will be meaningful only if it is properly enforced, so we need to provide a long-term settlement for the National Wildlife Crime Unit, as well as resources for the CITES border force team. Thirdly, as we have heard, the Bill currently applies only to elephant ivory. The risk is that we will be displacing demand from elephants to other ivory-bearing species such as killer whales, sperm whales, walruses, hippos and narwhals, all of which are under varying levels of threat. There are only 100,000 hippos in the world today. That is staggeringly depressing. I hope that the Government will look again at including a wider range of species in the Bill.

In October, we have the IWT conference, following the first one four years ago. It is right that we should celebrate some of the good news. It is fantastic that China is closing down its state-owned carveries and banned all domestic ivory trade at the end of last year. The US has introduced a near-total ban. Hong Kong is promising to do the same. However, we must also acknowledge that the problem is growing, not shrinking, despite everything we have heard and seen over the past few years. The conference is an opportunity for us to exhibit real ambition. We need to use every lever at our disposal to encourage other countries, including the members of the European Union, to introduce their own ivory bans as a matter of urgency.

We need to tackle online crime. We heard a bit about this from the hon. Member for Bassetlaw. So much of the trade has shifted online. I recommend that colleagues read a recent report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare called “Disrupt: Wildlife Cybercrime”. It paints a very bleak picture, but it also gives reason to be cheerful. In March this year, 21 companies, including Google, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft and Alibaba, joined forces with the WWF, IFAW and TRAFFIC to launch the Global Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. And it works: in just one year, eBay removed more than 25,000 listings from its site.

We need to expand the focus of the summit beyond ivory. In the past decade, more than 7,000 rhinos have been poached for their horns. Grey parrots are being hoovered out of the African continent at a totally unsustainable rate. Since 2000, l million pangolins have been caught and sold for meat and medicine. Fisheries are being desecrated by illegal fishing operations all around the world, plunging the communities that depend on them into desperate poverty. This is organised crime on a massive scale. That needs to be reflected in our approach.

Finally—again, I echo some of the remarks by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw—we need to see a much greater emphasis on this and a greater level of commitment to it from the Department for International Development. It is extraordinary that just 0.4% of our vast official development assistance budget goes towards nature, let alone tackling the illegal wildlife trade. We may be part of a small club of nations honouring our commitment to meeting the UN target on overseas aid, but we are miles behind countries such as Germany, the USA and others when it comes to funding restoration of ecosystems, tackling wildlife crime and protecting the environment. There is a link between poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability—that is well established and unarguable. That must now finally be reflected in the work of DFID, not least so that the public, many of whom are very sceptical about its very existence, can buy into it and understand what it does. It is time for DFID to wake up.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I was just finishing, but I will take an intervention.

[Alex Chalk]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend; I have ruined his peroration. Does he agree that there would be a great deal more buy-in from the public if the Department for International Development were renamed the Department for International Development and Conservation, so that people could understand that that was a key part of its mission?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I totally agree with the thought behind my hon. Friend’s question. Whether that should be the Department’s name, I do not know, but I agree with where he is coming from.

There is a clear link. One only has to look at Somalia. There is a direct link between the collapse of the fisheries off the coast of Somalia—the moment when it was declared a dead zone by the United Nations—and the rise in piracy. There were tens of thousands of families with boats and children to feed, and knowledge of the seas but no fish to catch. What did they do? They became pirates. The same is now beginning to happen around Senegal as a consequence of illegal activities by vessels from all around the world. When we destroy ecosystems, we plunge the poorest people—the people who most depend on the free services that nature provides—into hideous poverty. It is the most destabilising thing we can do, and DFID has not yet exhibited any understanding whatsoever of that well-known and well-understood phenomenon. It is time for DFID to wake up.