The CITES meeting in Bangkok (March 2013) highlighted once more the wavering fortunes of wild elephants. We are forced to recognise that poaching has been on a steady increase for over a decade, and that all steps to prevent this so far has failed.

At the policy level, the conflict remains one of whether a strict international ban on the trade in tusks will succeed, or whether a regulated trade will work instead. The skepticism about the international ban approach (which dates back to the 1989 CITE meeting) stems from several factors. These include the failure of the ban and accompanying education campaigns to reduce demand in foreign markets (which are to be honest, not exclusively Asian).

Source: Stock.Xchng
To move the debate on a bit, I'd like to reproduce an argument Michael Eustace made in a letter to the Business Day

DEAR SIR, The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned trade in ivory in 1989 but that has not stopped elephant poaching. There are many different estimates as to how many elephant are poached each year but 20,000 would seem a reasonable assumption. Most of the ivory of about 200 tons is sold to Chinese buyers with criminals making all the profit. The wildlife donor agencies persist in promoting increased law enforcement and changing the Chinese mindset as being the solution but neither is working as is evidenced by the ongoing poaching. Law enforcement in a corrupt society is ineffective and changing the Chinese mindset has been tried over many years and proved futile. China wants ivory and Africa has ivory. Both would prefer a legal trade rather than a criminal trade. Africa can sell the ivory that is gathered from natural deaths to China so as to satisfy some of the demand. There are about 500,000 elephant in Africa and some 10,000 die each year of natural causes. They leave 100 tons of ivory. That ivory could be sold by a broker, with a monopoly over all legal supplies of ivory, to a Chinese cartel of ivory carvers who could then sell to licensed retailers. That would establish a clear legal pipeline and China, as part of the deal, could undertake to close down the illegal trade and also confiscate stocks from speculators. With the price of ivory having risen strongly in recent years, speculation is likely to have been a significant part of overall demand. Some poaching will continue but it will be a lot less and a legal trade will save the lives of at least 10,000 elephants every year. In addition there would be $100 million in profits each year for Africa’s parks rather than international criminals.

This neatly encapsulates some of the frustration some conservationists have with the ban. It is the bans failure that motivates the rethink of the strategy. The basic weakness as I see it, is the ban was implemented to frustrate the illegal market of the 1980s. Expecting it to still work in the 2000s depends on the black-market not having changed- that the criminal conspiracies have not worked out means to circumvent it. The problem is the black market has changed. It is no longer hidden within the legal market. It operates with independent smuggling and sale into an underground market (at least, within China the unregistered factories and shops serve this function).

There is also a lot of elephants in Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where the 500,000 mentioned above comes from.

Source: www.grida.no; Author: Riccardo Pravettoni, GRID-Arendal
We are in a position where natural deaths could supply a lot of demand in China. To put things into perspective, the one-off sale in 2008 to China of ivory, was an export of 62 tonnes- which they are eeking out by releasing 4-5 tonnes a year. As the letter above notes, we can actually supply a lot more than that, every year.

At the moment, the Chinese legal trade is really, just too small-scale to be impacting on the illegal trade. If we are serious about reducing poaching then this trade will have to increase in volume to crowd out the illegal market.

In 2003 the chapter I wrote on wildlife trade[1] mentioned the illegal ivory market a few times. This was in the wider context of the conservation effects of bans. The chapter was based on a 2001 meeting in Cambridge University in September. I was unable to attend this meeting because, well, the 9/11 terrorist attacks stopped a lot of international flights at the time.

The (commercial) international trade in ivory was effectively banned at the 1989 Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species (CITES) meeting. Elephants were listed on Appendix I instead of Appendix II. An Appendix I listing does not permit commercial trade in the wildlife or their parts. It has no implications for domestic trade however. An Appendix II listing allows a regulated trade under a system of permits (and sometimes quotas).

There have been two one-off sales of stockpiled ivory to China and Japan since then. The demand for ivory products has not as far as we can tell, waned in these Asian markets. Rising incomes in China are if anything, leading to an increase in demand. The one-off sales are intended to reward those African countries with well-managed elephant populations. If you have elephants, then you accumulate tusks (from natural mortality, culls etc). The better you are at conserving elephants, the more there is, and the more tusks you accumulate. Cashing in those tusks can be a way to support this conservation. It’s also contentious. Many conservationists continue to support a tough, ban-the-trade strategy.

From the book chapter ten years ago:

The rationale for the ban was straightforward. The legal trade in ivory was providing poachers with a means of smuggling ivory into final markets in Europe, North America and Asia. Authorities and consumers were unable to distinguish poached ivory from legally obtained ivory. This gave poachers the least-cost way to market their product in overseas markets. Hence if the legal trade was sacrificed, poachers would not have this smuggling route available. The sacrifice did, however, give elephant populations a chance to recover p48

This is a view I share with some other conservationists. The 1989 ivory-ban was a temporary measure. It was going to buy time for elephants. That time could be used to implement better trade and management. Or we could blow the opportunity and let smugglers develop counter-measures.

Faced with a sudden rise in distribution costs, smugglers patiently developed alternative routes that were independent of the legal traffic. Instead of simply waiting and hoping for the ban in ivory to be lifted, new routes and new markets were developed p49-50

In a not very prescient observation, I noted that shipping containers were starting to be used to smuggle poached ivory. In December last year a shipment of 24 tonnes[2] was found in two such containers by Malaysian customs. Shipping containers are being interdicted that have ivory concealed in them. This is probably a function of the bulky nature of tusks. You need some way of moving a lot to make it economic.

Anyway, this is what we have seen happen. New routes have developed. New markets, especially in South East Asia and China have grown.

…Simple policy measures may work for a time but they end up being circumvented. Regulations rearrange costs and have flow-through effects to final markets. These market spill-overs spur participants to circumvent these costs …

The poaching crisis for elephants is now recognised to be as extreme as the 1980s.
I don't think my book chapter was very wide off the mark.



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[1] Moyle, B. (2003). Regulation, conservation and incentives. In Oldfield, S. (ed). The Trade in Wildlife: Regulation for Conservation, Earthscan Publications Ltd., London & Sterling, VA. Pp. 41-51.
[2] This news item also employs the popular and erroneous urban myth that the trade in wildlife is about Traditional Chinese Medicines.