Ivory trade puts elephants on the road to extinction - David Pilling

On the fringes of Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda, farmers drum loudly
throughout the night to scare off their most destructive enemy: the elephant. In the nearby
Bwindi rainforest, small surviving herds of savannah elephants, cut off from their diminishing
natural habitat, have adapted to a hidden existence beneath the canopy.
Throughout Africa, elephants and humans are in intense conflict. Humans are winning. A
hundred years ago there were 10m elephants roaming the continent. By the mid-1970s that
number had collapsed to 1.3m. So had the elephants range, with herds restricted to ever-smaller
pockets of land in ever-fewer countries.
Today, there are 400,000 elephants left, roughly a third of them squeezed into one relatively safe
haven, Botswana. The story of the elephant is one of retreat, retreat, retreat, retreat, says
Patrick Bergin, chief executive of the African Wildlife Foundation, a conservation group.
If loss of habitat is the biggest problem, it will only worsen. Africa has the worlds highest
human fertility rates. In the next 30 years, the continents population will double to 2bn. In
another half century it could double again. Then there is the slaughter. In the 20th century, it was
white game hunters. In the 21st it is Asian ivory collectors, whose appetite and wealth has
encouraged poaching on an industrial scale.
It is hardly the first time humans have driven mammals towards extinction. Yuval Noah Harari,
author of Sapiens, calls us ecological serial killers. The sabre-tooth tiger had existed for 30m
years. Within 2,000 years of its first contact with humans, it had vanished forever. A similar fate
befell a range of animals from mammoths and mastodons, a distant relation of the elephant, to
giant sloths. Even before humans had invented the wheel, they had destroyed half of all big
terrestrial animals.
If humans are uncontrollable serial killers, then surely the elephants fate is sealed. Inevitably
they will go the way of the American lion. At best, they will be driven to near-extinction,
preserved in a few city zoos and armed-to-the teeth sanctuaries. Or can anything be done to
preserve the worlds largest land mammal in anything like its present numbers? There are two
strategies to arrest the catastrophe. Unfortunately, they pull in opposite directions.
One is to intensify a 1990 ban on the ivory trade imposed under the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species, which is meeting in South Africa this week. In addition to
outlawing the sale of poached ivory, an extended ban would prohibit trade in all ivory products,
including antiques. The trade in legal ivory is open to abuse, with new ivory easily passed off as
old. Environmentalists say that if China and other big Asian ivory buyers, including Vietnam
and Malaysia, support a ban, the market dynamic can shift.
There are obvious flaws in this strategy. Ban anything, from cocaine to Kalashnikovs, and the
result is gruesomely predictable: its price will rise. That would energise poaching, not stop it.
Even if, by some miracle, the policy worked and ivory lost its monetary value, African farmers
would be left with marauding herds of worthless mammals. Other than their intrinsic beauty,
they would be valuable only insofar as local people could capture some of the resulting tourist
dollars.
The opposite approach would be to legalise the trade entirely. Like debasing a currency, the idea
would be to force an elephant devaluation. Under this scenario, the market would be flooded

with existing stockpiles and arrangements put in place to harvest tusks. The hope would be to
drive the price below that at which it is worth the risk and cost of poaching. Call it fiat ivory.
A sustainable harvesting approach has merit. But it may be too late to try. Mr Bergin says
there are too many humans and too few animals. Legalisation of ivory would be a death knell,
he says.
Two experimental auctions, in 1997 and 2008, breathed life into the illegal trade by creating
fungible ivory. Yet if partial legalisation failed, so has the 25-year prohibition. Once again,
elephant populations are in alarming decline.
The bigger question still is whether humans and wild animals can live side by side. Africa is
huge. It could accommodate the US, China, India and western Europe. But from the elephants
perspective, it is a shrinking universe.
Unless African governments, working in conjunction, can protect areas of wilderness and
connecting corridors indefinitely from development, the debate on ivory trading will be a
sideshow. That is the mastodon in the room. david.pilling@ft.com
Ban anything, from cocaine to Kalashnikovs, and the result is predictable: its price will rise