Title: Destruction of ivory
Content: of that year China's State Council declared its intent to halt ivory-related commerce by the end of March 2017. In 1989 Richard Leakey, a paleoanthropologist and conservationist from the prominent Leakey family, was named head of Kenya's Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, the forerunner to today's Kenya Wildlife Service. Elephant hunting had been banned in 1973, but the ivory trade remained legal. By the 1980s, elephant poaching had become widespread due to the increasing price of ivory. In a May 1989 article, "The New York Times" described Tsavo National Park as "an elephant graveyard - piles of bleached white elephant

Title: Elephant
Content: rivalled that of gold. The ivory trade contributed to the African elephant population decline in the late 20th century. This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan. Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks. CITES approved an international ban on ivory that went into effect in January 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the

Title: Elephant
Content: by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings ceased in 1988, when Zimbabwe abandoned the practice. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies. In June 2016, the First Lady of

Title: Destruction of ivory
Content: Agency, the "control system" turned out to be easy to manipulate, ultimately increasing the value of ivory and empowering smugglers. At the October 1989 CITES convention in Geneva, representatives from Tanzania proposed an effective ban on the international ivory trade. After heated debates, the ban was enacted, and went into effect in January 1990. The ban proved effective for about a decade, and saw rising elephant populations, but starting in 1997 CITES began granting exceptions to the ban to allow countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to sell a limited amount of ivory, as well as an exception to

Title: Ivory trade
Content: around the system. Despite these public revelations by the EIA, and followed by media exposures and appeals from African countries and a range of well-respected organisations around the world, WWF only came out in support of a ban in mid-1989, indicating the importance of the "lethal use" principle of wildlife to WWF and CITES; even then, the group attempted to water down decisions at the October 1989 meeting of CITES. Tanzania, attempting to break down the ivory syndicates that it recognised were corrupting its society, proposed an Appendix One listing for the African Elephant (effectively a ban on international trade).

Question: The increasing scarcity of elephants and rhinos led ot a 1989 ban on which substance?
Answer: Ivory