The 1989 ivory trade ban has led to government stockpiles of ivory (from seizures/arrests and herd culling), and no legal means of selling the stuff. In recent years, “countries considered to have well-managed stocks of elephants and reliable systems for tracking tusks have three times been allowed to sell consignments from government stockpiles.” Recent requests for permission to sell ivory stockpiles from Tanzania and Zambia, however, were denied by the U.N.’s?Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Some environmentalists applauded the decision, on the grounds that any ivory sales encourage elephant poaching (the data on this is mixed), while others pointed out that occasional legal sales are not the biggest problem facing elephants today. “While the issue of whether sales should be allowed to proceed or not has dominated much of the discussions here… the key driving force behind the ongoing elephant poaching is the continued existence of illegal domestic ivory markets across parts of Africa and Asia,” said one expert. Meanwhile, Foreign Policy‘s Joshua Keating wonders if the ivory decision may have been politically motivated. Do any Freakonomics readers have a novel way of eliminating government ivory stockpiles without encouraging poaching? (HT: Eric M. Jones)[%comments]
Addressing the Ivory Surplus
TAGS: environment
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Adorn elephants with ivory? Isn’t that a bit like asking someone to wear the murdered skins of their ancestors?
Agree with emw to a certain extent. But the only people who would come forward to take it for free or to buy it at lower prices would be people who would buy it anyway. I don’t suppose they would want to announce to the world (much less the UN) that they are looking out for ivory.
I think this was something mentioned on this blog a few years ago: produce lots of counterfeit ivory and flood the market. Some of the real ivory could be slipped in with the counterfeits. This is of course assuming that you can make good enough counterfeits that people can’t tell the difference.
The ruling makes no sense.
1-As stated the additional (legal) supply will push down prices.
2-The ability for the government to profit from poaching will provide an incentive to police it.
Both will deter poaching.
Given the corruption plaguing many countries in Africa (and else for that matters) we can well imagine a scheme where people in the government share the benefits of the ivory sales with poachers. Government wins, poachers win, elephants, though, lose.
The problem here is that the sale of ivory for money does not ensure that this money doesn’t come back (somehow) to the poachers. The ivory should be thus exchanged for something that has no value to poachers but a lot of value for the country selling it. For example, building schools, roads, wells, etc. That removes some economical burden on the government and profit also to local people, but not particularly to poachers.
There is still, however far fetched it is, the possibility of an alliance between humanitarian associations and poachers. An alternative would be to fund elephant defense by selling the ivory.
The government can sell the ivory on the open market. The govt. can then use the funds to hire special enforcement agents to track and apprehend poachers.
And using the broken glass concept, it is likely that stopping poachers will put an end to a variety of other criminal enterprises. The government can then confiscate the goods of all the poachers they catch, from all their total criminal activities, and sell those goods to fund future or expanded enforcement actions.
Basic supply and demand principles mean that by selling stockpiled ivory, supply to the market will increase and prices will decrease. As the price decreases, the lure of poaching will also decrease.
Poachers will each have a point where the incentive (price of ivory) does not compensate them for the risk (the law), and as prices decrease, more and more poachers will drop out of the market.
Sell all the ivory at market prices.
Use the tusks to beat the poachers.
Kip – Counterfeit ivory is always easy to detect. It is either made of plastic – which can be detected using the ‘hot needle method’ – or made of bones, which are obviously different from ivory for people who know what to look for. That is not a particularly good solution.