Kazakhstan plans to export saiga horns in limited batches using a traceability system.
This is reported by Nege.Aqsha citing the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources.
The Minister of Ecology, Yerlan Nysanbayev, emphasised that this is not about free trade. The export will supposedly be carried out under strict regulation of quantity and methods of sale. A maximum limit on exports has been set for three years.
One of the key conditions is expected to be the introduction of a product traceability system. To this end, it is planned to integrate Kazakh and Chinese accounting systems to track the movement of derivatives from the point of extraction to final processing.
According to Nysanbayev, the traceability system has been under development since 2023 in collaboration with 'Kazakhtelecom'. All collected saiga horns have identification chips and are individually accounted for.
Recall that on 5 December, at the CITES conference in Samarkand, 111 countries voted in favour of lifting the zero export quota for saiga horns from the Kazakh population. Seven countries voted against, including Mongolia.
Between July and November 2025, Kazakhstan already removed around 196,000 saiga. The carcasses were handed over to local processors.
It is also worth noting that in 2023 the country already went through a saiga culling campaign, whose catastrophic results were acknowledged (and promised to be taken into account) even by the relevant government agencies themselves.
Interestingly, now that the country has finally obtained the desired permission to trade in valuable saiga horns, it turns out that the traceability system for their export was already being developed in 2023. Even though, back then, the issue of exporting derivatives does not seem to have been discussed so actively.
But if the system for export was already being prepared at that time, does that mean a commercial plan existed from the very beginning? As usual, there are many questions. And the answers to them, apparently, have little to do with concern for biodiversity.