Ivory Trade

Lord Carrington of Fulham Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Carrington of Fulham]

That this House takes note of the impact of the trade in ivory on endangered species, and of the efforts being made to eliminate that trade while protecting the cultural heritage of antique ivory.

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to have secured this debate, timed as it is to air the issues around the trade in ivory and the protection of endangered species ahead of the closing of the Defra consultation on 29 December. I recognise that, because of the consultation, my noble friend the Minister will be constrained in what he can say in reply. I look forward to the contributions from all your Lordships and, in particular, the maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, who has experience second to none of the problems of law enforcement.

I start, perhaps surprisingly, by making it clear that I have no interests to declare. I am not involved in the antiques trade, nor am I active in the conservation sector. In common with many people, however, I own some small items made of or decorated with ivory. Their value is minimal and the proposals in the Defra consultation paper would not materially affect me.

There is no question but that the first priority has to be to protect elephants and the other endangered species which are hunted for their ivory in Africa and Asia. The figures are stark, as laid out in the Defra consultation: the number of elephants has declined by some 30%, from 480,000 10 years ago to an estimated 144,000 on the latest count. There is little doubt that this has been driven by the demand for raw ivory to be carved, principally in China and Vietnam. I understand that China is soon to introduce a ban on ivory carving, but it remains to be seen how effective this will be and whether Vietnam will follow suit—there are some indications that Vietnam is in fact expanding its carving industry.

There has been a ban on the sale of new ivory for over 40 years under CITES. The UK has a ban on the sale of any ivory that is post 1947. The problem is that, as can been seen from the decline in the elephant population, this ban has not worked. One reason is that there is a demand for ivory carvings in the Far East, but it is not only a Far Eastern problem. New carvings—often passed off as old carvings from prior to 1947—seem to be readily sold on the internet and elsewhere in countries that, like the UK, have a ban. The problem is that the ban as it stands does not work. Everyone is agreed that we need a more effective ban and most people, as well as the WWF, agree that there will need to be exemptions from the ban.

The consultation suggests that museum-quality items held in museums could be traded between museums and that there would be an exemption for musical instruments and for items whose ivory content is minimal compared to the totality of the object—the so-called de minimis rule. There is also increasing acceptance, notably from the WWF, that miniatures should also be exempt. As I am sure your Lordships know, miniatures are small painted portraits that were popular in the late 18th and early to mid-19th centuries. They were often, but not always, painted on to thin ivory discs. However, ivory was used for many religious, decorative and household objects right up to and beyond World War II, when plastics increasingly took over most of the uses of ivory.

Some items are of important heritage value, possibly of museum quality or near museum quality. Take, for example, a medieval religious ivory carving, of great cultural and historical importance: few would argue that it should not be preserved for posterity. However, where it belongs to a private individual, as many do, under the present proposals it could not be sold unless it met the very restrictive definition of the,

“rarest and most important item”.

It could be donated to a museum, although, in many cases, this is not practical as museums want only the best, not the second best, and often only one of a particular type of object. Museums do not see their role as being to provide storage of many duplicate or near duplicate items. Indeed, many museums, when offered a collection of any sort, will accept it only if they can sell the items which they do not need for their own collection, usually in the open market and rarely to other museums. So, if no museum can be found to accept a fine medieval ivory, the only way to dispose of it would be to destroy it, since it could not be sold. I have taken a medieval carved ivory as an example, but many thousands—probably millions—of objects made of or incorporating ivory were created in 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and not just in Europe but in India, China and, most wonderfully, Japan, where some of the greatest artistic treasures were carved from ivory from the 17th century onwards.

Ivory was used as decoration, as inlay and as veneer on furniture; it was used as insulation on silver coffee pots by the finest makers; and it was used to make handles and knobs on clocks, barometers and furniture. The knobs were often detachable and so would cause difficulties over whether they should be considered part of, say, a barometer and are therefore covered by the de minimis rule, or as a stand-alone item and therefore, under the proposals, destroyed. Ivory was used for the heads and arms of dancers in the fine statuettes made in the art deco period of the 1920s and 1930s. Ivory was used for more mundane items, such as for handles on knives and forks. It was even used for tickets to theatres and opera houses in the 18th century—little discs about 25 millimetres in diameter and 3 millimetres thick, with the date of the performance and the name of the person who purchased the ticket on the face of the disc. That is a specialist interest, but of very real cultural and historical value. It is hard to see that there would be any interest in using new ivory to reproduce those tickets, whose value is typically about £300. The ivory content in that little disc would not be of any interest to an ivory carver in China to re-carve into something more commercial. Given the increasing acceptance that portrait miniatures should be exempted because the amount of ivory they include is so small, it is hard to see why other small ivory objects should be destroyed.

I could expand the list endlessly, but I hope I have given enough examples to show the scale of the problem and the difficulty of defining which items are of museum quality, as museum quality is not confined to those items in museums. Then there are the problems of defining where the ivory content is a minimal part of the whole fabric of the item and therefore covered by the de minimis rule. Is the ivory inlay on a piece of 18th-century furniture covered by the de minimis rule, even though the amount of ivory used is greater than that in a Japanese 17th-century netsuke? As the Japanese netsuke is a solid piece of ivory, although weighing less than 200 grams, it would be destroyed whereas the piece of furniture would not be.

There is one further problem that I want briefly to mention. We would all see the sense in stopping the export of unworked ivory, such as the elephant tusks used by the Victorians to support dinner gongs in country houses. We would also see that ivory billiard balls—and virtually all were made of ivory until quite recently—can be re-carved to produce Chinese ball carvings, and that these new carvings of old ivory could be used to pass off new carvings of new ivory as being the same. In other words, new ivory could be laundered as old ivory. The problem is in the antique restoration business. Antique ivory often needs restoration, like most antiques. If a museum-quality carving needs to be restored, this can be done only with a source of ivory to carve the replacement piece. The source is typically from old billiard balls so, if the sale of billiard balls is banned, the restoration of ivory items becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.

My argument is that this is a complex problem which needs to be solved sensitively. We need a solution which stops the trade in new ivory, stops new ivory being passed off as old ivory and does not lead to the destruction of beautiful, culturally valuable items of historical interest. I suggest that the difficulty comes down to identifying old ivory from new and to ensuring that only a highly controlled and limited trade in ivory heritage items is allowed. Identifying old ivory from new is a specialist business, but one that is done all the time. For larger items, it is possible to carbon-14 date the ivory. It requires taking a piece of the ivory and subjecting it to radioactive treatment. That does not work for smaller items because of the size of the piece of ivory that is destroyed in the dating process. But specialists in ivory can identify old carved ivory from new, partly by the colour, partly by understanding the effect that time has on the deterioration of the ivory, and partly by the quality and type of carving, as well as the evidence of the carving tools used. That is a skill learned from handling many ivory items over many years, which rests in the upper echelons of the antiques trade and auction houses.

Vetting items is a regular part of what happens when an object is taken by a dealer to one of the better antiques fairs. Indeed, much of the value of an antique relies on the item being vetted for its genuine and original state. But vetting would not be enough by itself; it would be open to abuse by rogue experts. I would suggest that it could be coupled with a licensing system, so that the people doing the vetting have to be licensed to perform this task. That in turn could be expanded so that only licensed auction houses and dealers could sell antique ivory. That might sound expensive to administer, and I can quite understand that my noble friend the Minister would quail at the thought of adding that complexity and expense to the Defra budget. However, I suspect that the auction and antiques trade, through the trade bodies, might be prepared to administer and pay for any vetting and licensing scheme under the supervision of Defra.

Of course, any item of ivory, which, for whatever reason, failed the vetting and any possible carbon dating, would not be able to be sold and would probably be destroyed. The vetting system could be coupled with a total ban on the export or import of any type of ivory item, something we will have the power to implement once we leave the European Union—although this might lead to smuggling and just drive the international antiques market into less regulated countries, rather defeating the purpose of protecting elephants and hippopotamuses. Vetting and licensing would depress the value of ivory items domestically, but that might be a small price to pay, compared with a total ban.

I hope I have explained the problems to be overcome, and suggested a workable solution to how they can be overcome, while at the same time achieving our united objective of stopping the sale of new ivory masquerading as old ivory. If we do not find a solution to this problem, the consequences for anyone who owns an ivory item, from fine pieces to everyday items, would be serious, and the consequences for our artistic, cultural and historical understanding of the past would be tragic. I believe this problem is capable of solution, and that we can save the elephants while at the same time saving our history. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, we have had a very interesting, indeed an excellent debate. I thank all noble Lords who have participated, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for his exemplary and excellent maiden speech. I took two things away from it. One was his comment about the difficulty of policing gifts, on which we all need to reflect, because it bears directly on whether ivory can be passed down from one generation to another successfully. The other is that he is from Sheffield. Sheffield was one of the great users of ivory in the 19th and the early part of the 20th century. There is barely a set of cutlery from that age which does not have ivory handles, as did that of the grandmother of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis; some are of very fine quality indeed.

There is unanimity across the House on the objective of protecting the elephant and other endangered animals that are sources of ivory. The question is how that can be achieved. I hear the doubt expressed about whether the ivory trade can be regulated in a way that will be effective in achieving our joint objective. I believe it can; I know that others believe it cannot. We need a proper study of whether a process of vetting—as I said in my speech, it is well practised in the antiques trade—coupled with a rigorous licensing system that takes out all the small auctioneers without expertise and the small dealers in trinkets, could achieve the objective we all want: preserving the elephant. With those comments, I commend the Motion.

Motion agreed.