Inside a cluttered tourist gift shop, an AFP reporter posing as a buyer asked to see banned African ivory and after a heated debate between the shop's two owners was shown smuggled tusks apparently hacked from the head of a slaughtered elephant.

In a quiet back room filled with tall stone Buddhas and small ivory trophies, three thick lengths of part-hollow, roughly sawn ivory were laid out along with a large ornately carved tusk with an asking price of 6,000 US dollars.

The shop owners made no effort to mask the difficulty of trying to export it. "You cannot take this through the airport, police will catch you," the middle-aged woman said.

"Hollow tusks indicate they (poachers) killed the elephant and ripped the whole tusk off. In Thailand they mostly just cut the tips off (a live elephant) so they do not hit the nerve which is responsible for the hollow space," said Tim Redford, of environmental group WildAid.

"They have only become dependent on African tusks because Asian wild elephant stocks have already been so badly affected by poaching," he said.

Wildlife enforcers in Thailand -- home to the world's largest ivory market -- are hampered by a loophole in the law that allows buying and selling of tusks from domesticated local elephants.

Environmentalists say smugglers take advantage of the law by mixing illegal African and Asian tusks with the legitimate ivory. The two types are virtually indistinguishable.

The only time officials could easily identify African tusks was when found uncarved as they are usually much larger than the Asian variety. None of it, legal or illegal, can be exported.

"As much as 99 percent of the ivory here now is poached African ivory," said Redford.

In Asia, only Myanmar allows some domestic trade in ivory but it is more regulated than in Thailand, according to international wildlife trading monitor TRAFFIC.

Conservationists want to close the loophole. They may be helped by new research published this month which suggested DNA testing of tusks could help identify the country, or even forest, where the elephant was from.

They warned the trade threatened the African elephant as well as their even rarer Asian cousins -- which number as few as 34,000 -- despite a 15-year ban on the trade of their tusks.

The ivory trade ban was imposed in 1989 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) after poachers wiped out more than half of all African elephants in the 1980s, leaving a population of about 600,000. A single one-off sale was allowed in 1997 for three southern African nations.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said most ivory carved in Thailand finds its way to China and Japan, Europe and the United States in the luggage of the 10 million holidaymakers who visit the kingdom every year.

"Thailand has been a key ivory carving centre for centuries and the craftsmen are skilled at carving everything from Chinese gods to Japanese name seals, which appeal to tourists," says WWF Thailand director Robert Mather.

Mather says the WWF and Thai Government have almost eradicated ivory from the windows of major tourist hotels, but souvenir shop backrooms like in Chinatown show how easy it is to trade in illegal ivory.

When the AFP reporter suggested pieces he had been shown were too small, the woman said: "That's no problem, I can take you to many more shops near here".

Thailand has made efforts to halt the illegal trade and in 2002 customs agents raided the northern Thai town of Phayuha Kiri virtually shutting down one of the world's oldest and best known ivory carving centres.

Earlier this month, Thai customs police intercepted a shipment of smuggled ivory at Bangkok airport valued at an estimated 97,000 dollars. It had come via Singapore in crates marked 'carbon ceramics,' a heat-resistant material used to make ovens.

Wildlife experts say the latest seizure highlighted the need for tougher laws and consumer education ahead of this week's CITES meeting in Bangkok bringing together 166 countries.

Namibia wants to change the rules to allow it to export 2,000 kilograms (4,409 pounds) a year of raw ivory from elephants which have died naturally. But environmentalists say this will only open another loophole for smugglers to exploit.

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