WORLD IN BRIEF : JAPAN : World’s Biggest User of Ivory Accepts Ban

Japan, the world’s largest consumer of ivory, agreed to abide by an international ban on ivory imports, a move seen as vital to the effort to save the African elephant from extinction. The announcement came on the last day of a two-week conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, of CITES, the French acronym for the International Convention on Trade in Endangered Species. A ban could never be effective without Japan, a CITES spokesman said, since that country “accounts for around 40% of world imports of ivory.” Some conservationists estimate that the number of African elephants has been halved in the past decade, plunging from around 1.3 million to the 625,000 mark.