The anology here would be, that poaching is a thing even though it's illegal, so say we found a way to create ivory that is indistinguishable from the real thing, without any harm to animals.

You can flood the market with it curbing the demand, and still continue to hunt down poachers.

There's an argument to be made that they might have an easier time claiming their ivory is actually fake but the real strategy is to make poaching just not worth the risk by inpacting the reward.