JFW on ivory trade at ASIL meeting in Washington DC
On April 9th, I joined Craig Hoover, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Susan Lieberman, Federal Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking, and Anna Frostic, Humane Society of the U.S., on an American Society of International Law panel in Washington, DC organized by Rachelle Adam of Hebrew University. The subject? “Can International Law Help Prevent the Rapid Disappearance of Wildlife?” The entire panel can be seen on YouTube. My presentation starts at 17 minutes in, and runs for 13 minutes.
Rethinking Ivory: Why Trade in Tusks Won’t Go Away
My latest article, “Rethinking Ivory,” appears in the Summer 2013 issue of World Policy Journal, and is now available online. It challenges the conventional wisdom on the ivory trade and argues that a well-regulated commerce in tusks could offer a realistic way forward for elephant conservation.
JFW ivory interview on Austrian Broadcasting Corporation
Elephant poaching has been much discussed recently in global media, and at the just-concluding CITES conference in Bangkok, for good reason — elephant killings are at an alarming high.
I was interviewed by Chris Cummins on Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio station FM4, which has an English language news magazine program called “Reality Check.” The piece is “The Ivory Wars,” and I’m included in the 15 minute podcast (starting at 12:30 minutes into it), and also in the story that accompanied it. Click here for the podcast/story, which covers the crisis, and what might be done to address it.
Why Are Elephant’s Tusks So Valuable?
Rebecca J. Rosen, an associate editor of The Atlantic, has posted a thoughtful, analytic piece on elephant poaching that goes beyond outrage to ask the key question: what’s behind the desire for ivory?
She concludes:
“The power of the idea of ivory is immense, and shows no signs of waning…perhaps the only hope is that the price will go up and up, through greater regulation and greater monitoring, putting ivory once again out of reach for even the middle class. The irony of this is…make ivory even rarer, even more reserved for only the very few, and esteem for it will only rise.”
The Elephant in the Meeting Room
CITES got it wrong on ivory sales—and elephants are the losers.
The 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, ended March 25 in Doha, Qatar. For two weeks, 175 national delegations confered and clashed over plummeting bluefin tuna stocks, the status of polar bears, endangered Iranian newts and, once again, the elephant-sized shadow of the ivory trade.
Ivory is an endlessly contentious conservation issue that just won’t go away. Recent elephant killings have spiralled sharply upwards, recalling the poaching crisis of the 1980s. That slaughter halved the continent’s population and led to the adoption of a ban on cross-border trade in ivory in 1989.
Contrary to many media reports, the current continent-wide half-million-strong elephant population, although vunerable, is actually increasing—the losses to poachers are offset by burgeoning herds in southern Africa. Still, continued killings and a thriving illicit trade in tusks are stark evidence that the ivory ban hasn’t worked the way its advocates hoped.
The red flag for animal advocates at CITES was the effort by Tanzania and Zambia to win approval to sell their government stockpiles of legal ivory. Such “one-off” ivory sales have happened only twice before, in 1999 and 2008, and raised $20 million for elephant conservation.
Many observers said the two countries did not have a convincing case that their national herds were sufficiently well-managed to be “downlisted” to a less-threatened status which would allow regulated trade in their products. There were also concerns about the documentation of their stockpiles. As a result, their proposals went down to defeat.
But that’s hardly reason to celebrate, as many animal groups have done. In fact, the fixation on preventing legal ivory sales distracts policy makers from coming to grips with the underlying causes of ivory poaching: Human desperation and poverty, corruption, underfunded and ineffective wildlife departments, and unregulated domestic ivory markets operating openly in many of the thirty-seven African elephant range states.
Animal advocates insist legal ivory sales stimulate poaching. It’s a claim that has been repeated so often that it’s widely accepted as fact, when it’s anything but. According to TRAFFIC, the joint IUCN/WWF wildlife trade monitoring network, illicit trade in ivory declined for five years after the 1999 sale of ivory to Japan. After that, illegal trade began to rise, and the trend was well underway before the 2008 ivory sale to China and Japan.
Instead of lobbying at CITES for the imposition of a twenty-year moratorium on ivory exports backed by Kenya and Mali (which failed to gain support), animal advocates should have given serious consideration to how a consistent flow of ivory could actually help elephants.
That’s right—help.
The real problem with one-off sales is that they can’t be counted on to happen, which makes the flow of ivory unpredictable. That 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. In the 2008 sale, legal ivory sold for $75 a pound. Contraband tusks sell for three to five times that amount. If the former were available, who would risk buying the latter—and for far more?
Granted, it would take enormous effort and resources to reach the level of enforcement, certification, and international cooperation necessary to run a highly regulated legal ivory market, but it is the only way forward. Five years of 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.
The key to converting ivory demand into something that helps elephants is utilizing the huge supply of gleaming tusks routinely recovered from the carcasses of elephants that die of natural causes. This guilt-free ivory is kept in vaults by African governments in the hope that someday their “white gold” can be sold. It’s estimated that up to a hundred tons of ivory supplied by the natural mortality of the continent’s elephants could be recovered yearly. That’s enough to supply the domestic ivory market in China and Japan, currently the only CITES-approved buyers, who’ve agreed not to re-export any ivory.
Some insist it’s too soon to try reopening restricted trade in tusks and that in any case the elephants need a “reprieve” until highly threatened populations in some countries recover. But shutting off all legal flow ensures that pent-up demand can only be supplied by the black market. That will mean more, not less poaching.
A strictly limited ivory sales system accessible only to countries with stable elephant populations could help underwrite a viable future for African elephants. It would be a powerful incentive to all range states to crack down on corruption and illegal killings and better protect their national herds.
There was a lot a stake for elephants at this recent CITES meeting, and not many signs of bold thinking. Sadly, Africa will be left with even more elephant poaching, and growing piles of tusks that can’t be sold.
JFW interviewed in The Seattle Times
Sandi Doughton, science reporter for The Seattle Times, has a story in the paper today, “Sale of elephant-tusk stockpiles may encourage poaching, experts worry.” I was interviewed for the piece, which appears one day in advance of the opening of the CITES meeting in Doha, Qatar, at which Tanzania and Zambia’s proposals to sell their ivory stockpiles will be hotly debated. Doughton writes, “Walker argues ivory sales in countries where elephant populations are healthy may be the best way to ensure the species’ survival. ‘You do not have to kill elephants to get their ivory,’ he said. ‘Elephants die … and they leave behind these gleaming tusks.'”
The story could not be more timely. Read the entire article here.
Selling Ivory to Save the Elephants
I wrote an Op-Ed that appeared in The Washington Post on October 17, 2009—the 20th anniversary of the ivory ban vote that brought the ancient international trade in ivory to a halt—to ask why the ban wasn’t more effective. It’s reprinted below:
Selling Ivory to Save the Elephants
By John Frederick Walker
Ivory poaching is back, big time, and the Internet is awash with photos of bloodied tusks and elephant carcasses.
In 2007, Kenyan wildlife officials counted 47 elephants killed by poachers. In 2008, the number jumped to 98. Estimates of the number of elephants now being poached across the African continent range as high as 37,000 a year. All this despite a ban on international trade in ivory that was enacted 20 years ago today.
Why hasn’t the ivory ban been effective? Mostly because it doesn’t fit the reality of the situation.
In 1989, anti-ivory campaigners were riding a wave of worldwide revulsion at poaching that had halved the African elephant population over the previous decade. They took their cause to CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), the U.N.-administered convention that governs trade in endangered species. At the 1989 Conference of Parties in Lausanne, Switzerland, member countries ended more than a week of heated debate on Oct. 17. On a vote of 76 for, 11 against, and four abstentions, the African elephant was put on the list of species considered threatened with extinction. Inclusion prohibits all cross-border trade.
But there was a catch: Countries with well-managed populations could apply to CITES to have the status of their elephants declared to be less threatened. If they proved their case, they might be allowed to resume trade in ivory. Still, global trade in tusks had been banned, putting an end to the commerce that had been the curse of elephants for millennia.
In the aftermath, elephant poaching in Africa declined. But then it grimly started climbing back, and today it is at disturbing levels, as recent seizures of huge amounts of poached ivory make clear.
Some conservationists say the problem with the ban has been lack of enforcement. Many African countries with elephant populations have unregulated domestic markets at which items made from poached ivory can be purchased and then smuggled out of country. There’s little dispute that better policing is desperately needed.
Other advocates point to CITES-permitted legal ivory sales as the ban’s major flaw. These sales have been authorized twice — most recently in late 2008, when Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa were allowed to auction 100 tons of ivory collected from elephants that had died of natural causes. Those tusks went to Japan and China, which agreed not to re-export any ivory, and the $15 million raised went toward elephant conservation.
Ivory trade opponents — including Kenya — have long argued that legitimizing any trade in ivory, no matter how tightly controlled, sends the wrong message to poaching rings and feeds the demand for ivory. But TRAFFIC, the joint World Wildlife Fund/International Union for Conservation of Nature wildlife trade monitoring network, says there’s no hard evidence that these sales lead to more poaching or increased illegal trade in ivory.
Enforcement issues and potential ivory sales are sure to dominate the CITES conference in Doha, Qatar, in March, at which Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique are expected to submit proposals to sell their ivory stockpiles — and set off alarmist media coverage.
But what’s happening to elephants and their ivory is far more complex than the picture painted by most news organizations, which focus almost exclusively on elephant killings, giving the impression that these great creatures are being killed all over the continent.
The truth is that ivory poaching is most widespread in African states saddled with civil wars and racked by humanitarian crises, riddled by corruption and lacking effective conservation — of which Congo is an all-too-ghastly example. By contrast, elephant numbers are increasing in the stable countries of southern Africa, where anti-poaching efforts have had some effect. Botswana has 130,000 elephants, nearly a quarter of the entire continental population. In South Africa’s Kruger National Park, officials have concluded they will have to turn to culling to keep their growing herds from altering the landscape of the New Jersey-sized refuge.
Add in another inescapable fact: Tens of tons of gleaming tusks are recovered annually from elephants that die of natural causes in Africa’s parks and reserves. Not surprisingly, countries that are doing a good job of managing their elephant populations argue that they should be able to benefit from the sale of guilt-free tusks to raise badly needed funds for the conservation of their giants.
That’s what the procedure for seeking an exemption to the ban and gaining permission to sell ivory stocks was supposed to address. The problem is that the possibility of these sales is revisited at every CITES conference, which means that legal buyers (currently, ivory traders and merchants in China and Japan) can never be certain of future supply. That keeps the black market alive, preventing legal ivory from undercutting illicit supplies and crippling organized poaching. It’s estimated that 100 tons of ivory could be supplied each year from the natural mortality of Africa’s elephants, an amount likely to meet Asian demand for this long-revered carving material. A tightly controlled but steady stream of legal ivory from countries with protected herds, coupled with strict policing of domestic African ivory markets, may sound like an unholy coupling of conservation policies — but it just might work.
Through almost all of human history elephants have been regarded as mere bearers of treasure; now we find them far more important than the ivory they carry. That’s why the ivory ban came into being 20 years ago, and why the international community will never return to a completely unregulated ivory trade. But if the ban’s limitations aren’t addressed, its provisions strengthened — and new ideas incorporated — we’ll end up facing another 20 years of poaching, ivory trafficking and elephant killings.
John Frederick Walker is the author of “Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants.”
Do Ivory Sales Encourage Elephant Poaching?
The illegal killings of five elephants so far this year in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park have generated international furor and a spate of outraged reportage. The fact that their remains were found with their tusks hacked out—in a park that was notorious for out-of-control ivory poaching in the 1970s—has given rise to renewed talk of impending doom for the remaining herds in Africa. And, predictably, unprecedented attacks on how the nearly 20-year-old international ivory trade ban is being administered by the Geneva-based CITES Secretariat.
Patrick Omondi, species mangagement coordinator for the Kenya Wildlife Service, is one of a number of conservationists and animal advocates convinced that the recent 60% rise in ivory poaching in his country can be blamed squarely on last year’s legal sale of over 100 tons of ivory from southern Africa.
No one doubts that Omondi cares deeply about elephants. But is he, and those who agree with him, right? Almost certainly not—and that’s bad for elephants.
Here’s the background. The 2008 sale of tusks from Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa was only the second exception to a global ban on cross-border trade in ivory that took effect in 1990. It was conducted under the auspices of CITES, the 173-nation UN-administered convention that governs trade in endangered species, and netted $15.4 million dollars.
Final approval for it came out of the CITES meeting of member states in the Hague two years ago, at which African nations allowed four countries with growing, well-managed herds to profit from their conservation successes in a “one-off” sale—with restrictions.
Only ivory from legitimate sources (natural deaths, problem animals) could be sold, and only to CITES-approved buyers (Japan and China), who agreed not to reexport it. Funds raised had to be used for elephant conservation and no further exports from countries involved in the sale would be permitted for an additional nine years.
But Omondi has been in I-told-you-so mode since the latest incidents in Tsavo. “What we warned would happen is happening,” he told the UK’s Telegraph. “This legal sale has restarted the demand for ivory, and illegal poachers and smugglers are back in business.”
The idea that any legal ivory sales will surely encourage poaching is the mantra of anti-ivory campaigners (and widely repeated in the media), but on examination it just doesn’t stand up. It’s very hard to prove a causal connection between the two, as serious researchers have discovered. TRAFFIC, the joint World Wildlife Fund / IUCN wildlife trade monitoring network, says there’s no hard evidence that these sales will lead to more poaching or increased illegal trade in ivory.
In fact, legal sales may help suppress poaching. CITES expects the recent sale of tusks, at which legitimate ivory averaged $152 per kilogram, to undercut black market ivory, which was said to be going for up to $800 a kilogram in Asia—and it’s those inflated prices that provide the primary incentive for poaching in countries suffering from poverty and corruption.
Legal ivory sales raise much-needed elephant funds. Guarding these magnificent creatures isn’t cheap. There are rangers to hire and arm, fences to repair and build, land to be purchased for wildlife corridors.
Think about it: elephants don’t have to be killed to get their tusks. They leave these spectacular incisors behind when they die, and in many areas these are routinely recovered. That’s why tons of ivory is stockpiled in the warehouses of African parks and wildlife services each year. Cash-strapped African nations aren’t about to destroy stocks of this valuable “white gold”—particularly when no elephants were harmed in collecting it.
The history of ivory makes it clear why demand for this alluring organic material is never going to disappear. It’s been prized for millennia for its seductive, tactile qualities and its ability to be finely carved, and its use is ingrained in numerous cultures around the world.
Ivory needn’t be the elephant’s curse. Tightly controlled exports of legitimate ivory from Africa could be treated as a self-renewing resource that helps fund the effective conservation of the animal that has always been its greatest source.
Obviously, that would require a degree of regulation and enforcement that has so far proved elusive, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth striving for. New approaches to assuring a future for elephants—ones that Africans as well as elephants can live with—are desperately needed.
Last fall’s CITES-supervised ivory sale was a step in that direction, not a step backwards.
John Frederick Walker 
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