This month’s [CITES] meeting will consider competing proposals about how absolute the ban should be, since in some countries elephant populations have recovered (see article). Countries seeking a modest relaxation have a strong case to make. But it is not strong enough. The ban must stay.Just to reiterate my point from that earlier post, banning ivory sales (and, by extension, the sale of other parts of elephants) doesn't completely shut off the supply of elephant ivory, but it does decrease it because the costs of supplying ivory are higher (due to the penalties for supplying an illegal product). If you relax the ban, then the supply of ivory (and other elephant parts) will increase, and you'll end up back where you started, with elephants critically endangered. The Economist's article seems to agree:
To understand why these reasonable-sounding proposals should be rejected, consider what has happened to elephant numbers since cites most recently authorised some legal trade, when Botswana, Namibia and South Africa were allowed in 2007 to sell a fixed amount of ivory to Japan, as a one-off. Elephant numbers started falling again. A survey conducted in 2014-15 estimated that elephant numbers had fallen by 30% across 18 countries since 2007; another estimated a decline of over 100,000 elephants, a fifth of the total number, between 2006 and 2015. Increased poaching was at least partly to blame.
These numbers suggest that the existence of even a small legal market increases the incentive for poaching. It allows black-marketeers to pass off illegal ivory as the legal variety, and it sustains demand...
The objection to trade in products of endangered species is not moral, it is pragmatic. When the world is confident that it will boost elephant numbers rather than wipe them out, the ivory trade should be encouraged. Regrettably, that point has not yet come. And until it does, the best hope for the elephant—and even more endangered species, such as rhinos—lies not in easing the ban on trading their products, but in enforcing it better.Perhaps we could farm elephants, as I noted in this post from 2015:
As a totally different approach, what about farming elephants and flooding the market with cheap farmed ivory? The problem with wild elephants is that they are a common resource - rival and non-excludable. Rival goods are those where one person's use of the good reduces the amount available to everyone else, i.e. in this case one poacher killing an elephant reduces the number of elephants available to everyone. Non-excludable goods are those where you cannot easily prevent a person from obtaining the benefit from them, i.e. in this case it is difficult to stop the poachers from hunting. Farmed elephants (rather than wild elephants) would be private goods - rival and excludable. The farmers would (in theory) be able to exclude others from obtaining the benefits from the farmed elephants, and would have an incentive to sustainably manage their elephant herd. Farming as a solution for elephant poaching has been suggested before - see this piece by Shaun Jenkins last year as one example. Of course, others have criticised the suggestion (see here in response to the Jenkins article).One problem with farming is that would spell the end for wild elephants (if you wonder why, consider how many wild chickens there are). However, one thing is clear - relaxing the current ban is not a good option.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
Read more:
- Saving the elephants, only for the hippos to be hunted
- The debate over poached elephants
- This couldn't backfire, could it?... Stockpiled ivory sales edition
- Because crushing ivory is so much better than burning it
- This couldn't backfire, could it?... Ivory burning edition
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