AHC#4 Ivory Conservation Myth

<<< Click on a cover to

view a previous article

<<< Click on a cover to

view a previous article

<<< Click on a cover to

view a previous article

The Ivory Conservation Myth

By I J Larivers

As Africa’s wildlife hurtles toward extinction, buoyed along by well-meaning, but totally ignorant well-wishers, fed utter rubbish by power and money hungry greeny organisations, it is interesting to note Mark Twain’s observations on how the greater populace can and will be bamboozled in the name of a self-serving few. Africa’s wildlife needs an African solution, devoid of emotive responses from unqualified, disinvested armchair conservationists. - Ant Williams

"The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first…The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: ‘It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war.’ Then the few will shout even louder…Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it... Next, statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." - Mark Twain

Failed Conservation Strategies

Albert Einstein once said that doing the same thing over and over again and each time expecting a different result was the definition of insanity. Einstein may have lived before the age of personal computers, but he was basically right. It seems so many new conservation initiatives are simply doomed-to-fail attempts at re-inventing the wheel. In most cases, the better mousetrap, like the greener grass on the other side is an urban legend.

I find myself growing more and more cynical as time goes by. While the unkind might point to my grey beard as a possible cause, I never cease to be amazed by the First World’s attempts to solve the Third World’s problems - such as how to protect endangered species - with solutions which are untenable simply because they don’t embrace the realities of the Third World.

There are broad general calls for the “holistic” maladies of the Dark Continent - chief among them, poverty - to be redressed before local populations can be expected to show any interest in conserving their wildlife. I fear about the only thing adherents to this school of thought have gotten right is that without involving local populations in a grass roots effort, conservation efforts are pretty much doomed to failure. Looking at African politics over the past few decades, since the winds of change first fanned the continent, 21st century African governments are devolving farther and farther away from stability, transparency, and accountability. Consequently, core problems like poverty are becoming worse and worse.

I can read the stories of regular African Hunter contributors such as Ivan de Klasz who hunted in places like Somalia and Ethiopia half a century ago and they exude much promise for the future. I can reflect on my own extensive travels through what is now the Congo and South Sudan thirty years ago, and my impressions on how projects like the Jonglei Canal would re-shape the economy in such regions. Look at these countries today.

That amorphous entity “The West” is full of ideas like the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Initiative, which among other thing postulates giving African countries schools and clinics. Africa is one of the richest continents on the face of the earth, and most of its countries could easily build their own universities and hospitals in the right environment. Sadly, they are moving away from that environment and farther into poverty and chaos, but giving them a sporadic infrastructure they cannot maintain only serves to make them less able to drag themselves out of the hole.

Once, in some forgettable village along the Congo river, I was shown a badly worn fragment of tin by a villager, who kept repeating something that sounded like “stally, stally!” A paratrooper, one of Mobutu’s elite presidential guard who had attached himself to me to practice his English explained as best he could that the old woman was trying to say “Stanley”. Henry Morton Stanley had, indeed, passed through this way in the 19th century after he had found Livingstone, and as a kid I had read his Through the Dark Continent. This woman had had no formal education whatsoever and her whole understanding of life, the universe and everything was through oral tribal tradition, passed down around innumerable campfires. She had no idea of who Stanley was, but she knew an ancestor had been given this trinket by him. The only conclusion I can draw is that this would have been one of the fabled “beads and (polished tin) mirrors” that early explorers used to hand out to local villagers in trade. That encounter was three decades ago, and the romantic in me hopes that if that village is still there, one of the old woman’s descendants still has “Stanley’s” mirror. The soccer balls and t-shirts handed out by Chelsea Clinton on a whirlwind tour of East African conservation areas a couple of years ago will, in contrast, have long since turned to dust and they symbolize the West’s approach to Africa’s problems. (“The East”, on the other hand, is encouraging direct foreign investment and re-colonizing Africa at an alarming rate.)

One of the more contentious issues right now is whether destroying stockpiles of ivory and rhino horn will help to curtail the international trafficking in them, or whether it is merely First World symbolism imposed on Third World cultures.

Back in 2002, the Organization of African Unity promulgated Africa Environment Day to raise awareness of the various environmental challenges facing the Dark Continent, and this year it was celebrated on 3 March; the date coincides with World Wildlife Day, declared by the United Nations in 2013 so as not to be left out.

A commemorative day! Wow! And yet today, the mass slaughter of Africa’s endangered species is worse then ever before. What went wrong?

Firstly, the end-users in the Far East are leaving a bigger and bigger footprint in Africa. Secondly, international terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, al Shabbab, Janjaweed, Boko Haram and ISIS are more established, more organised, and more in need of a steady and significant revenue stream. The differences between them are probably about the same as between the Gambino and Lucchese families, and they constitute a formidable force against Africa’s wildlife, if not always its ideologies.

Secret Ivory found in the West

Most African nations have conservation legislation and anti-poaching operations. Whether their efforts are mostly home-grown or coordinated through the efforts of CITES, Interpol and Traffic, most have (or claim they have) stockpiles or ivory, and sometimes rhino horn. Such hoards are legal and legitimate products of pro-conservation legislation and operations, but legally are worth about as much as Zimbabwe dollars because international protocols largely prevent trade in them. The only real contribution these stockpiles represent to the conservation effort is that they have penalised traffickers financially by their loss.

The fact that if these troves could be legally traded they would represent a great deal of income for conservation projects (or whatever) for developing countries is not lost on the respective governments holding them. One school of thought is that if these vast quantities of ivory and rhino horn could be sold they would not only bring in money but also decrease the continuing illicit trade by satiating the demand. I’m far too cynical to believe that legally selling these stockpiles will have much of an effect on demand. 1.8 billion consumers is a lot of consumers.

So, fuelled by Western culture and sadly Western donors who are either largely out of touch with African realities or animal rights activist groups whose main raison d’etre is the generation of large sums of money and oftentimes obscenely healthy salaries, many African governments have been encouraged to burn their ivory and rhino horn hoards. The theory is that by removing the ivory from the market, you remove the incentive to traffic it. Trouble is, most grade school children would realize that stockpiled ivory has already been removed the market, and it holds a value. Since 1989, Kenya has burned over thirty metric tons of confiscated ivory. Daniel Arap Moi, encouraged by Richard Leakey and various environmental activist groups in fact started the ball rolling. (Twelve years after sport hunting was banned, and local villagers were given very little reason to safeguard their wildlife, which in many instances is all but gone.) President Kenyatta has gone on record as saying that during the year Kenya will burn the remaining stockpiled ivory, estimated at some 115 tons.

It would be nice if we had tangible data to test whether the destruction of the contents of ivory stores has any impact on poaching and trafficking. We don’t. Environmentalists love it because it’s a form of grand-standing and grand-standing makes those (tax free) dollars roll in. But if it works as a deterrent, why is poaching now at an all-time high? I myself would argue that it has the opposite effect. I’m a poacher and by some bad deed I did that caused the spirits of my ancestors to turn against me I got caught selling illegal ivory. Damn! I’ve lost all that money. Better go out and get some more. And if I can’t get more to pass on to the consumers, what there is still out there on the hoof is worth even more. Economics 101.

Activists continue to argue, though, that by not destroying and instead selling stockpiled ivory and rhino horn we are somehow legitimizing the trade in illicit product. Since one hundred percent of the ivory in question has been recovered from traffickers, I fail to see the logic. The black market, and legal trade are two completely separate beasts. A side argument, of course, is that there is no way of knowing how much good revenue earned from the legal sale of stockpiles will do, since there will be a degree of corruption in its end use. OK, fair enough - we can’t quantify that.

And how important are these stockpiles in the Grand Scheme of Things anyway? The fact is, most traditional enforcement policies implemented by African countries to curb poaching and trafficking don’t seem to be working - because of a lack of resources, because of corruption, or both, or myriad other causes. In the same vein, attempts by entities such as CITES and US Fish and Wildlife, to name but two to curb ivory trade internationally are probably having little more success. As window-dressing, they’re great, but the key players in a big part of this game are governments. Who polices the police?

I do not believe that destroying ivory stockpiles is a solution to the poaching problem because if anything it takes the concept of local communities owning, managing and conserving their resources even further away - the government and foreign donors and “experts” become the only stakeholders. On top of, of course, the fact that even with my basic knowledge of economics I can’t see any use in destroying a tangible asset, except for symbolic reasons.

The old, hackneyed concept that wildlife must have a tangible value in order to survive was never truer. Especially in southern Africa, where we see private commercial crocodile farms, ostrich farms, game farms and nature reserves flourishing, we see grass roots-based community involvement and the protection of wildlife because it is the peoples’ asset.

Regulated sport hunting is one of the core foundations of such market-oriented schemes. True, the “average person”, whomever that may be has trouble differentiating in their mind between hunting and poaching, and the activists don’t want them to think much beyond signing a cheque anyway, but without the hunter as a legal end-user, the market value of the resources decreases and so does the urgency of conserving it.

Apply this to Africa’s elephant population and if the rural communities having to live side-by-side and compete with wildlife have no vested interest, e.g., ownership rights, why should they support the conservationists with the soccer balls and t-shirts instead of the poaching cartels with ready cash?

In Zimbabwe, the very successful CAMPFIRE program has made populations of wild animals the property of the local villagers, and they have the ultimate incentive to protect their wildlife - it belongs to them, and the poachers are stealing from them. Namibia’s communal conservancies function in the same way.

Granting ownership of wildlife to local communities is the easiest way to turn a poacher into a gamekeeper.