The Ivory Market: Keep It Closed, or Open It Up? In 1989, after a decade in which nearly one million African elephants were killed for their tusks, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) banned the international trade in ivory. For years the treaty showed signs of success, as the price of ivory collapsed, and with it elephant poaching. But after hitting a nadir, the illegal ivory trade has exploded once again. Some conservationists have begun to argue for a legal trade in ivory, saying it could help stem elephant poaching. Others warn that legalized ivory will only fuel the frenzy for tusks. Could a legal ivory trade actually protect elephants? Daniel Stiles, a Kenya-based conservationist, says Yes. Elizabeth Bennett of the Wildlife Conservation Society warns that it s a dangerous idea. Only Legal Ivory Can Stop Poaching by Daniel Stiles Daniel Stiles, PhD is an independent consultant who has carried out extensive research on the ivory trade and the causes of elephant poaching. He is a member of the IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group. How about no more ivory trade, and no more deaths of these intelligent peaceful creatures due to poaching? Comments like the one above, posted as a response to an article advocating a legal ivory trade, reflect a widely held sentiment in the West. They all make the assumption that elephants have to be illegally killed for there to be trade in ivory. It is a false assumption. Another false assumption is that banning the legal ivory trade will stop poaching. If I believed it were that simple, I would be leading the charge to close legal ivory markets. But it s not that simple. After studying the issue closely, I ve come to the conclusion that a limited legal trade in ivory is likely to help elephants more than the current prohibitionist regime. A coalition of US and European groups is encouraging worldwide domestic trade bans on elephant ivory and destruction of national ivory stockpiles as a strategy to save elephants from extinction. Regrettably, this Stop Ivory approach reflects an overly simplistic, Western viewpoint founded in animal rights ideology. It inflicts questionable policies on African countries, with disastrous consequences for both Africa s people and wildlife. The ban-ivory-everywhere policy pursues a top-down, authoritarian approach that aims to protect wildlife through prohibiting trade, increasing law enforcement, and constricting supply by confiscation and destruction. It recalls the War on Drugs and we have seen how well the War on Drugs has worked. The results have been the rise of brutal criminal gangs, widespread corruption of government officials, and increasing use of illegal drugs. The complete ivory ban strategy relies on the same prohibitionist thinking, without considering the alternative of regulated use and taxation accompanied by consumer education to lower demand, a strategy which has shown success in reducing tobacco use. This prohibitionist approach is advocated by groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Humane Society of the United States. They consistently oppose all commercial use of wildlife, regardless of whether such uses are sustainable, and even positive, for habitat and species conservation. IFAW s president recently wrote an article headlined, There s no such thing as a Sustainable Wildlife Trade. Now, conservation organizations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and World Wildlife Fund have joined forces with the prohibitionists. This coalition mischaracterizes the situation to rally public opinion and high-level political support in Western governments for a policy opposed to what in past years was a holy grail sustainable development. The prohibitionist argument depends on six premises. (Since China is the prime recipient of poached ivory, it determines the future of elephant poaching, and the discourse below applies mainly to China.) The arguments go like this: 1. The existence of legal ivory can be used to launder illegal ivory. 2. Corruption is so widespread that no system of legal trade could ever work. 3. Increasing ivory supply will only increase ivory demand, as demonstrated by the two one-off ivory sales from southern Africa. 4. The China market is so huge that there are not enough 4 4 www.earth island journal.org
( ivory for sale ) + / - In a Corrupt World, a Legal Trade Undermines Conservation by Elizabeth L. Bennett Elizabeth L. Bennett, PhD is a vice president at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Ivory to trade, or not to trade? With elephant populations declining rapidly across large swathes of their range due to poaching, answering that question correctly is vital to the animal s future. African elephants, from which most of the world s ivory comes, are facing their worst crisis since 1989, when international commercial trade in their tusks was banned. The illegal ivory trade has more than doubled since 2007 and is now more than three times greater than it was in 1998. In 2011 alone, some 35,000 elephants were killed for their ivory. Forest elephants have suffered the most dramatic losses. Between 2002 and 2011, their population declined by 62 percent. Populations of African savannah elephants in eastern and southern Africa are under growing threat as the wave of poaching spreads. Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania lost 66 percent of its elephants from 2009 to 2013. In addition to the devastating impact on elephant populations, illegal trade is also detrimental to local livelihoods. According to one estimate, income from tourism-related jobs during an elephant s lifetime is 76 times higher than from a one-off sale of its tusks. The current slaughter is due to a combination of burgeoning demand from East Asia, vastly increased infrastructure links between rural Africa and East Asia, and the relatively recent involvement of organized-crime networks in the trade. One proposed solution is to establish a legal ivory trade. The rationale is that legalization could allow for more effective control of the trade; legal sales could satisfy demand, thereby reducing uncontrolled killing; and the funds generated could be used to support elephant conservation. Numerous plant and animal species are subject to a managed trade that, in many cases, is sustainable. Could this work for elephants and their ivory? When considering this, we should recognize two characteristics of elephant ivory. First, it is of high value per unit mass. The economic value to the hunter is great, with a single kill equivalent to a region s average annual earnings. Second, elephants breed extremely slowly, with the longest gestation of any mammal to produce single offspring. While the incentives to kill animals are high, the supply of tusks is biologically constrained. Within that context, effective management of a legal ivory trade requires that systems be in place to ensure that illegal ivory cannot be laundered into the legal market. First, the supply of legal ivory entering the market must be tightly controlled. This means that illegal hunting must be prevented; legal hunting must be well managed with scientifically based quotas; and only designated animals must removed. Although feasible in theory, meeting these requirements is challenging because ivory s high value creates a powerful incentive to hunt illegally. Second, the trade itself must be regulated with tightly controlled chains of custody from source to consumer. These management systems must be robust enough to prevent leakage of illegal ivory into the trade chain. Again, this is feasible in theory. Genetic testing techniques could be used to identify individual items, but only if marking systems were tamper proof. This would necessitate transparency, good governance, and strong enforcement systems throughout the trade chain. One factor undermines efforts to establish the good management systems essential for any legal trade: corruption among government officials. Corruption is pervasive along the entire commodity chain, from elephant range countries to some of the main consumer countries. Bribery opportunities are exploited at all points in the trade chain, and enable the laundering of illegal ivory into legal markets. Officials are paid to turn a blind eye to poaching and trafficking; to alter CITES or other permits so that, through fraudulent paperwork, an illegal item seems legal; and to falsify certification at the point of processing or end point of sale. Wildlife management is particularly susceptible to subversion by corrupt officials because most wildlife officials are poorly paid and wildlife crime is generally not considered serious. This encourages bribes, especially when dealing with wildlife products of high value. Inspections at any point in the trade chain can be a site for bribery. In some circumstances, increasing the EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL summer 2015 45
+ / - ( ivory for sale ) elephants in Africa to supply demand. 5. Banning all ivory trade will collapse consumer demand. 6. Destroying all ivory stockpiles sends a message that poaching will not be tolerated. It makes seized illegal ivory impossible to leak into the market and it devalues ivory, lowering consumer demand. Let s examine each. 1. There are 34 legal factories and 134 legal ivory outlets in China. A relatively tiny amount of illegal ivory is mixed in with the legal ivory in these facilities and laundered. I estimate that about 99 percent of poached ivory is sold in illegal outlets, online, and through personal networks no laundering is involved. Closing the 130 outlets and the 34 factories will simply drive some buyers into the black market system. 2. The corrupt trade seen today developed under an international trade ban regime beginning in the mid-1990s. The African countries with the most corrupt ivory trade already have trade bans. So banning trade in more countries is not the solution. The solution involves bringing African governments into a transparent, regulated trade that confers benefits on rural people who live with wildlife. These people are the foot soldiers of poaching. If ivory and other wildlife products could meaningfully contribute to their livelihoods in a legal manner, they would be motivated to manage wildlife for the future. I advocate a system that provides incentives to obey the law, not the prohibitionist approach where the incentives are to break the law. The legal trade would be completely different than the existing corrupt one. Periodic auctions would be held under CITES supervision and marked tusks would be shipped directly from African government storerooms to Chinese government storerooms, avoiding all the points where bribing More Online: What do you think? Is it time to legalize the ivory trade? Take our poll at www.earthislandjournal.org and laundering could occur. Maintaining the ban will only continue the corrupt illegal trade methods. 3. The 1999 and 2008 legal ivory sales did not stimulate demand. Demand in Japan, the only country to receive the 1999 ivory, actually dropped after the sales, and it continued to drop after the 2008 sales. Ivory demand in China began to rise in 2005 after the government declared ivory carving an intangible cultural heritage and launched initiatives to promote it. Interest in ivory took off in 2009 during the global financial crisis as ivory became an investment vehicle. Concurrently, the CITES vote in 2007 to prohibit future legal raw ivory sales (until 2016 at the earliest) caused the price of ivory to spiral upward. Speculators began stockpiling ivory, expecting the price to continue to rise because of scarcity guaranteed by the moratorium. The black market ivory prices in China then spiked from $560-750 per kilogram in 2006 to $2,100 per kilogram in 2014. This tripling in price contributed to the elephant-poaching crisis. The 2008 legal sale, if anything, kept the price from going even higher. 4. One of the biggest misunderstandings is ivory supply and demand. It does not matter how many consumers want to buy ivory, any more than it matters how many people want a Ferrari. What matters is how many want and can afford to buy. If one really wants to lower consumer demand, it is imperative that mainly very expensive ivory items are manufactured. This policy cannot be implemented with a black market. Researchers have shown that the illegal sector provides the cheaper end of the market, which is much larger than the more expensive legal sector. And it is supplied 100 percent by poached tusks. It is the demand for cheaper worked ivory that causes so much poaching. Closing the legal market will not make the black market disappear; if anything, it will grow larger. People opposing ivory trade seem to forget that elephants do die naturally. There are more than enough elephants to supply a legal market from natural mortality without illegally killing a single elephant if the ivory items are kept expensive. 5. Would closing all legal ivory trade in China lower consumer demand? Unlikely. Most Chinese consumers already buy ivory on the black market knowing that the ivory is illegal. Why would closing the legal outlets change their ivory buying habits? They don t shop in them now, so closing them would change nothing. Some of the consumers who shop in the legal outlets might stop buying ivory, but most would probably find illegal ivory, adding to elephant killing. 6. The latest round of ivory stockpile destructions began in Kenya in July 2011. I was there, and I was left wondering what message was being sent. Since 2011, ivory prices and elephant poaching have risen. The intended message was not received. I believe that the prohibitionist ivory-trade policy has led to the elephant-poaching crisis and the deaths of 100,000 elephants in three years. It could have been avoided with a legal system of raw ivory supply to China. It is not too late to begin one. 4 6 www.earth island journal.org
( ivory for sale ) + / - photos boyd norton, flickr user meaduva number of enforcement officers merely results in more bribes. At three smuggling points on the Vietnam-China border, my organization, WCS, estimates that every day some $18,000 to $30,000 is given in bribes to border officials. Within such a system, the financial incentives to break the law outweigh those of abiding by it. The illegal ivory trade is largely run by organized criminal networks that resort to violence to ensure that the trade can operate. Ten years ago, independent ratings of countries effective governance (or lack thereof) explained the poaching of African elephants better than any other factor; the situation has deteriorated since then. Governance at the national level consistently emerges as a strong predictor of elephant poaching levels according to analyses by CITES. In this context of corruption, maintaining leak-proof chains of custody is challenging. Once illegal ivory enters the legal trade, it is difficult or impossible for enforcement officers to know what is legal or illegal. Even without such ambiguities, enforcement of illegal wildlife trade is challenging because wildlife agencies are understaffed, undertrained, and underresourced. At some points of the trade chain, enforcement does not even lie with wildlife officials, but with customs and urban agencies whose primary job is not wildlife enforcement. Expecting such officers to be able to distinguish legal from illegal commodities is unrealistic. True, DNA testing can determine the origin of ivory and isotope testing can determine its age. But such testing involves a significant time lag between detection of the item and verification of its provenance or age, making the technologies unsuitable tools for enforcement. Proponents of legalizing the ivory trade assert that the 1989 ban is no longer working. That assumes, however, that the 1989 ban was total. It was not. It was a ban on international commercial trade, but countries across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia continue to have thriving legal domestic markets. Those markets facilitate the illegal trade by providing an easy front for laundering ivory. Hence, the corrupt ivory trafficking networks were not created under an ivory ban regime. They were created under a mixed regime with multiple legal domestic markets into which illegal ivory can readily be moved. It is the very presence of a legal market within a corrupt system that stimulates the slaughter of elephants. It is for this reason that various African heads of state have called on all countries to place a moratorium on all ivory sales for at least ten years. In the long-term, corruption must be addressed because it subverts many areas of conservation. Tackling corruption that permeates countries across the globe will take decades, however. At the current rates of loss, that will be too late for wild populations of African elephants. If we are to conserve significant wild populations of the species, we have to close down all markets, both international and domestic. The only way elephants can be conserved is for laws to be clear and unambiguous so that no commercial trade of ivory is allowed. It is naïve to think that deeply entrenched and institutionalized corruption will fade into insignificance if there were a return to a legal international trade. The whole conservation community government and non-government must work together to ensure that all ivory trade stops for at least ten years, or until elephant populations are no longer threatened by illegal killing. EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL summer 2015 47
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