When You Ban the Sale of Ivory, You Ban Elephants

Doug Bandow

Elephant poaching is rampant throughout Africa. Unfortunately,
Western nations have exacerbated the problem by banning the sale of
ivory. Elephants are dying as a result. The West should reopen the
ivory trade.

Artists and artisans have used ivory for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to get tusks off a live
elephant. So in 1989 the international sale of new ivory products
was prohibited. Concluded analyst Peter Fitzmaurice, “with most
nations adhering closely to the ban, the legal ivory trade has been
decimated and value of this natural resource for range countries
has been vastly diminished.”

Nevertheless, the illegal trade continues. Asia is the prime
destination, but last year two New York City jewelers pled guilty
to trafficking in illegal ivory. An estimated 38,000 African
elephants are being killed annually, “more than at any time in
decades,” reported the New York Times. The elephant
population dropped from some 1.3 million in 1979 to 470,000 or even
fewer today.

Failure is not for wont of conservation efforts. Reported the
Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild
Fauna and Flora (CITES): “record levels of ivory were seized and
sustained throughout the period 2009 to 2011.” But that was not
nearly enough.

Earlier this month the New York Times reported: “As
ivory poaching becomes more militarized, with rebel groups and even
government armies slaughtering thousands of elephants across Africa
to cash in on record-high ivory prices, a horrible mismatch is
shaping up.” The Christian Science Monitor cited “the
growing professionalism of poachers bankrolled by international
criminals,” which had resulted in a sevenfold increase in the
number of elephants killed in Kenya.

CITES warned that the killings threatened even “previously
secure large populations.” Added the Monitor: “The increase has led
many wildlife experts to declare the current situation a crisis
worse even than the mass slaughter of Africa’s elephants in the
1970s and ’80s, which led to the global ivory trade ban in
1989.”

In short, ivory prohibition has failed. It has been about as
easy to stop elephant killing as to stop drug use. “As long as
there is strong demand in the consumer countries, we probably will
see people willing to risk going for ivory in the source
countries,” warned Norwegian Oystein Storkersen, who chairs a CITES
committee.

“The West should
reopen the ivory trade.”

This demand makes ivory valuable. Explained Fitzmaurice: “The
1970s saw the price of ivory skyrocket. Suddenly, to a herder or
subsistence farmer, this was no longer an animal but a walking
fortune, worth more than a dozen years of honest toil. To
currency-strapped governments and revolutionaries alike, ivory was
a way to pay for more firearms and supplies.”

Countries with impoverished populations, incapable governments,
corrupt officials, and limited resources were almost helpless.
Political instability and armed conflict multiplied the problems.
The World Conservation Union reviewed national efforts and pointed
to “inadequate law enforcement,” “lack of resources and weak
institutional capacity,” “human-elephant conflict,” “ongoing
instability,” and “expansion of agriculture onto elephant migration
routes.”

Occasional successes mattered little. CITES explained: “very few
large-scale ivory seizures actually result in successful follow-up
law enforcement actions, including investigations, arrests,
convictions and the imposition of penalties that serve as
deterrents.” The ivory seized sometimes disappears from government
warehouses. CITES concluded: “The costs of protecting species with
high-valued products may be beyond the means of many developing
countries.”

At least as long as there no local support for elephant
preservation. Observed elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton,
“It’s pretty hopeless to stop elephant poaching in Africa unless
you get local buy-in.”

Westerners see elephants as “charismatic mega-fauna,” majestic
creatures to be preserved irrespective of cost. African farmers see
giant rats and worse. When I visited Africa I observed how
elephants stripped trees of bark as well as of foliage. Economists
Erwin H. Bulte and G. Cornelis van Kooten estimated that “one
elephant annually consumes as much forage as required to bring 4.7
cows to full maturity.” Farmer regularly die defending their crops
from elephants.

When he was director of Kenya’s Wildlife Service David Western
explained: “Elephants are the darlings of the Western world, but
they are enemy number one in Kenya.” Indeed, he emphasized, “The
African farmer’s enmity toward elephants is as visceral as Western
mawkishness is passionate.”

This antipathy can be overcome, but only when elephants provide
surrounding peoples with a monetary benefit. In most African
countries elephants are the equivalent of the American buffalo. No
one owns them and the people living closest to them make money by
killing them. Reported the New York Times: “10,000
elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by
impoverished hunters, creeping around the jungle with rusty
shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down
en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces
with chain saws.”

These incentives can be reversed. Explained CITES: “provided
that their full value (i.e. both intrinsic and extrinsic) is fully
realized by the landholders involved, not only will elephants be
conserved but so will the accompanying range of biodiversity
existing on such land.” Indeed, Fitzmaurice reported that in some
parts of southern Africa today “Damaged land and crop losses are
not only being tolerated, but villages are doing their best to
guard against poachers. This surprising change in behavior is due
to the proliferation of government programs that dispense licenses
to villages, enabling locals, or paying hunters, to cull an
allotted number of elephants each year.” In these areas poaching is
down and some farmers have turned their marginal farms into game
reserves.

Unfortunately, the money from hunting and photo safaris rarely
is enough. Legalizing the trade in ivory and other elephant
products would provide additional resources. In essence, elephants
need to be treated like cattle. Their owners—or the
equivalent, such as villagers living near elephants—need to
benefit from the animals’ preservation. Noted Bulte and van Kooten:
“When trade is allowed, the characteristics of elephant stocks as
an asset are obviously different, because living elephants
represent a growing and valuable source of future ivory. Hence, in
the long run, trade in ivory may well promote elephant
conservation.”

Prior to 1989 Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, and
Zimbabwe allowed legal sales. These nations typically enjoyed
expanding elephant herds while the number of elephants in other
African countries, such as Kenya and Tanzania, was shrinking. More
recently, noted the World Conservation Union: “As elephant
populations in South Africa continue to grow, arguments between
those in favor of the resumption of culling and those against it
have become increasingly heated.”

The southern African states won CITES approval for two “one-off”
sales, in 1999 and 2008, of stockpiled ivory—seized from
poachers or collected from elephants which had died or been culled.
CITES explained: “The revenues are expected to boost the countries’
capacity to conserve biodiversity, strengthen enforcement controls
and contribute to the livelihoods of the rural people in southern
Africa.”

The measures generated unusually bitter debate, as some
environmentalists curiously claimed that legal sales would
encourage poaching. Mary Rice of the Environmental Investigation
Agency even denounced the “discussion of ‘legal’ sales” as likely
to increase “demand for illegal ivory.” In fact, the desire for
ivory, legal or illegal, is a preexisting reality, else elephants
would not be dying in catastrophic numbers.

Moreover, CITES concluded “that evidence has yet to be presented
that demonstrates a clear link between the one-off sales of ivory
and increasing levels of illegal trade.” Nor was there any
“evidence to suggest that the 2008 legal sales of ivory had any
discernible impact on the increasing trend in levels of illegal
killing of elephants, which had started in 2006.” Anthropologist
Daniel Stiles of Kenya also found that limited ivory sales had not
“stimulated ivory demand or elephant poaching.”

Unfortunately, episodic sales have only limited benefits,
generating modest revenues while failing to satisfy ongoing demand.
Observed CITES, the practice “provides no incentives to ivory
traders to confine their trade to legally available ivory.” This
unpredictability, added John Frederick Walker, author of
Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of
Elephants, “keeps the black market and its elephant poaching
gangs flourishing. You don’t need a degree in economics to grasp
that annual or biennial sales of certified stocks could serve to
undercut the illegal trade.”

The southern African governments would like to hold more sales.
Reported CITES: “Stocks of ivory held by governments have continued
to increase and there are pressures from range states with
expanding elephant populations to trade in ivory.” A proposal for
another sale will come before CITES at its March meeting in
Bangkok. But opposition from other African states and Western
environmentalists is strong. Unfortunately, their position could
doom many elephants.

Elephants need a genuine market in ivory to survive. In fact,
CITES published a blueprint last July for legalizing the ivory
trade. Explained the report: “A legal trade in ivory, elephant hide
and meat could change current disincentives to elephant
conservation into incentives to landholders and countries to
conserve them.” Equally important, regular legal sales would lower
prices, reducing the incentive for poaching. CITES did not take a
formal position on the issue but explained that it offered the
proposal “as a basis for negotiation towards a workable solution to
a trade in ivory.”

CITES suggested creating a highly centralized and regulated
system, though a legal ivory market could take many forms. CITES
emphasized conservation and estimated that a population of 500,000
elephants could naturally generate $6.7 billion worth of ivory
annually.

Much opposition to the ivory trade is grounded in a moral sense
that it is wrong to trade in elephants even though doing so is the
best means of preserving the species. Economists Jyoti Khanna and
Jon Harford wrote that during the 1980s “it was increasingly felt
that no state had the right to allow destruction of a species even
if its habitat was restricted to that country’s own territory.”

What’s the alternative? Some hope to convince Asian consumers,
in particular, to stop buying ivory products. Good luck. Walker
explained that his “research on the history of ivory has convinced
me that it’s a fantasy to think that the age-old desire for this
seductive carving material, valued globally since pre-history, will
ever disappear.” Nor are governments likely to stamp out the
illegal trade. Khanna and Harford found “little incentive on part
of the consumer states to commit resources for the purpose of
restricting trade, even if these countries attach an existence
value to elephants.”

Environmentalists also seek to pressure corrupt, incompetent,
and underfunded African governments to stop poaching. This is
equally unrealistic. Khanna and Harford pointed out: “In Zimbabwe,
for example, loss of ivory revenues led to a scaling back of
anti-poaching operations which resulted in 100 illegally killed
elephants in 1990 as opposed to only ten illegal deaths a year
earlier.” Anthropologist Richard Leakey, Kenya’s director of
wildlife management, warned: “Unless we can make wildlife
conservation profitable for all peoples, we cannot save our
elephants for the future.”

Elephants are not the only animals endangered by poaching. So
are rhinos. For instance, the New York Times recently
reported that South Africa “is throwing just about everything it
has to stop the slaughter—thousands of rangers, the national
army, a new spy plane, even drones—but it is losing.” Indeed,
added the Times, “Gangs are so desperate for new sources
of horn that criminals have even smashed into dozens of glass
museum cases all across Europe to snatch them from exhibits.”

Many other wild animals face varying threats to their existence.
However, the news is not always bad. In some cases markets have
been the key to conservation. For instance, vicunas once were
considered endangered but now, reported CITES, “are managed through
captive breeding and non-lethal harvests from wild populations.”
Wild animals “are taken, shorn and released.” The population
increased 40-fold between 1965 and 2010. Similarly, “The legal
trade in crocodiles is one of the success stories in CITES history
which shows species recovery as a result of trade.” In China
“tigers are being farmed with the intention of supplying tiger
parts in the future.”

But today elephants are dying, many because of ivory
prohibition. Economist Rasmus Heltberg observed: “One may find such
black markets and the poaching that supplies them immoral, but
ignoring their role by assuming them away may lead to misguided
conservation policies.”

CITES acknowledged the failure: “given the present rise in
illegal killing of elephants in West, Central, and East Africa it
is clear that current measures are not containing the present surge
in the illegal trade in ivory.” Western governments should stop
insisting on doing more of the same, which guarantees failure. The
only realistic alternative is to create a legal market for ivory
and other elephant products.

In March CITES must decide whether it is better for elephants to
be sacred and dead or commercial and alive. If elephants could
talk, they almost certainly would prefer the second. So should the
rest of us.

Doug Bandow
is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.