Poaching, Ivory and Trade
My grandfather, the same one who used to take me on a blindfolded journey into the ‘elephant graveyard’ as a child, was also an unwitting contributor to the deaths of unknown numbers of elephants himself.
He was the proud owner of an old 1920 knock-off Steinway upright piano that, of course, had ivory keys. He also had a number of horn- and ivory-hilted knives and forks, part of his prized collection. He wasn’t alone. Until the 1950s, before the widespread use of plastic, most keyboards had ivory keys, and ivory was a fashionable accessory for jewellery and decorative art, highly prized by all classes around the world. It was this trade that ultimately led to the rapid decimation of elephant numbers and it would be impossible to fully understand the plight of elephants today without considering the importance of that trade, both legal and illegal, over the course of the last century.
As we have already seen, the ivory trade has reduced the total African elephant population from many millions to a little over 400,000 individuals – less than the human population of a mid-sized city like Bristol. Whilst the mass killing of elephants has mostly been illegal in the last half century, the international trade in ivory was only outlawed in 1989.
Since then, two ‘one-off’ (yes, a total oxymoron) international sales of ivory have been permitted, in 1999 and 2008, between a few countries, as we shall see below. And domestic trade within countries has been largely legal. Domestic ivory trading bans have only been enacted very recently in a handful of countries, including the UK, which introduced domestic ivory trade legislation in 2018.
But if international trade in ivory is illegal, and domestic trade is increasingly being curbed, why are we currently living through another elephant poaching crisis? Why did poaching surge again from 2008? Why did 40,000 elephants die in 2011? And why have more than 600,000 kg of ivory tusks been seized in illegal shipments to Asia, Europe and the US in the years since the 1989 ban?††
The illegal wildlife trade – of which ivory is a part – is one of the principal threats to wildlife in Africa. The trade is currently the fourth or fifth largest international criminal industry after drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking, and is worth as much as US$23 billion per year according to the UN. It’s around the same as, if not more lucrative than, the illegal arms trade. Not only does the trade threaten the existence of species, but also international security, national sovereignties and impoverished rural communities.
Understanding – and controlling – the ivory trade is no simple feat. We need to consider the trade from all angles; from the poachers and the opposing individuals and agencies charged with protecting elephants on the ground, to the people coordinating the mass movement of illegal produce, and the consumers who fuel the trade by buying ivory. But of course, we also need to consider the trade from the elephants’ perspective as well.
Tusks – ivory – are simply teeth. Granted, different from our teeth, but they’re still teeth at the end of the day. Tusks appear from around two years of age and can grow at a rate of more than 10 cm per year in male savannah elephants, slightly less in females.
Some of the largest tusks ever known are those of Ahmed, a magnificent male who lived around Mount Marsabit in Kenya, in the mid-twentieth century. Ahmed’s tusks each weighed 67 kg and measured almost three metres long! Some brilliant legends surround Ahmed, my favourite being that his tusks were so large that he had to walk uphill backwards. Ahmed was such an important symbol that Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, conferred presidential protection on him, with five armed rangers providing constant security.
The tactic worked and Ahmed, despite being in his prime during the poaching resurgence of the 1960s and early 1970s, died a natural death in 1974, aged around sixty-five. During his autopsy, bullets from antique British Army rifles were dug out of his body, suggesting his life had not been entirely straightforward and his special protection was warranted. Few such ‘big tuskers’ remain, certainly no more than an isolated handful in South Africa and Kenya.
One now-famous big tusker of our lifetime with a less happy story is Satao. Although not quite as big as Ahmed’s, his tusks were still immense – 50 kg each, and so long they swept the ground in front as he walked. He was perhaps the largest tusker left in Africa in the twenty-first century. Amazingly, Satao managed to live in obscurity in the vast wilderness that is Tsavo for most of his fifty years, unknown even to long-term researchers and conservationists in the area. But his home range bordered the edge of Tsavo National Park, in a region that was increasingly being overrun with poachers.
In 2013, Mike Chase, of Elephants Without Borders, spotted Satao from the air, when he was surveying the area as part of the Great Elephant Consensus. Mike was concerned that Satao might be injured, having noted that he was moving in a strange way. Sure enough, veterinary teams that were dispatched found that Satao had been hit by a poacher’s arrow, but the wound was not deep or life-threatening. They decided not to undertake the darting procedure – made especially risky given Satao’s size – and Satao did recover quickly on his own. The bad news was that this meant the poachers in the area knew about him and were unlikely to give up on such a prize.
In May 2014, the arrival of rains – and with them, lush vegetation – drew the normally cautious and reclusive Satao to the edge of the park in close proximity to local poachers. Here, he was hit for a second time with a poisoned arrow, and this time he was not so lucky. The arrow penetrated deep into his body, and the poison rapidly took effect; he collapsed and died soon afterwards. He was found a few days later by conservationists, with his face hacked off and tusks nowhere to be seen.
His death would have been a significant bounty for the poachers who escaped with his tusks – earning them a couple of thousand dollars on the black market. Yes, you read that right: Satao was killed for probably less than the average British family spends on holidays per year. However, there’s an impressive mark-up in price along the whole ivory chain, given that end-consumers in China were paying about $2,100 per kilo in 2014, which would have made Satao’s tusks finally worth over $200,000.
Interestingly, a filmmaker who spent four years living in Tsavo whilst making the beautiful documentary film The Elephant Queen was the first to record and photograph Satao (although not publicly – the filmmaker kept all imagery and information about Satao under wraps in order to protect him before his death). He was convinced that Satao tried to hide his massive tusks as he walked. Satao travelled by zigzagging between bushes, and shoving his head and tusks into each bush as he reached them. There he’d wait for a few minutes, before continuing on to the next bush. Did Satao really understand what a liability he was carrying?
I guess we’ll never know, but one thing is clear, Satao’s death – perhaps more than that of any other elephant in Kenya – galvanised the Kenyan people into taking action against the loss of their iconic wildlife, piling pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta, who since then has been one of the most vocal leaders in anti-poaching campaigns. And since Satao’s death, Kenya’s elephant population has been better protected, with more rangers recruited to the Kenya Wildlife Service, more funding for KWS anti-poaching activities, and better coordination between state and civil-society conservation and law enforcement organisations. The result is that elephant poaching in Kenya has been decreasing recently, and the elephant population is finally stabilising.
The scarcity of tusks like Satao’s nowadays illustrates an intrinsic problem with poaching: the intense selective removal of large tusks means that fewer and fewer animals with large tusks are left. But even more than this, rates of tusklessness are increasing – that is, we are seeing more and more savannah elephants with no tusks at all. It is Darwinism at its most ruthless.
Under normal circumstances, we would expect about 2–4 per cent of females to be tuskless – it happens, but it is comparatively rare. But in Gorongosa in Mozambique – a population that has been heavily poached for a prolonged period – more than 50 per cent of older adult females that survived the civil war are tuskless, and more than 30 per cent of females born since the war are also tuskless. In Ruaha National Park, Tanzania, the figure is 21 per cent, and higher in older age classes. And in Addo, whose current population, you will remember, was founded from a bottleneck of only eleven elephants, 98 per cent of the females were tuskless in the early 2000s.
Tusks are used for obtaining food, such as tree bark, or digging for water, as well as in aggressive encounters between males. The impact of having more elephants born without these tools is not yet known. Perhaps elephants will have to range over larger areas to find sufficient substitute foods to replace what they could have accessed if they had tusks, or maybe they are finding innovative solutions to access food in other ways. It could also have an impact on the environment; failing to dig for water could mean that other animals who rely on the dug pools go thirsty, or lizards that prefer to live in trees that get tusked and de-barked by elephants could find themselves without enough suitable homes. The implications could be far-reaching and enormous in the long run.
But poaching affects more than rates of tusklessness. As we saw with the Mikumi population in Tanzania, if too many older individuals – especially the wisest matriarchs – are lost, breeding success and population growth can fall off dramatically. Socially, the young survivors of poaching are rather clueless, floundering around when they do not have elders to guide them. Orphaned calves who have survived poaching raids tend to form less-structured groups, often with other, unrelated individuals – as I found in the Botswana orphanage with Panda, Molelo and Tulli. The remnants of families who have lost their elders cluster around the oldest individuals that remain, while stress levels are also much higher in groups that do not have an experienced matriarch.
The groups formed by orphans can be large, but they are fairly loose – more of an aggregation than a unit. Like living in a crowd of neighbours, not a family. Moreover, those orphans are so socially disadvantaged – receiving more aggression and less affection when growing up without their mother – that they are less likely to survive long-term, or to be successful mothers if they do survive.
It can take an elephant population many generations to overcome the social effects of poaching, yet these real-life consequences are often lost in the seemingly endless debates about the politics and economics of the ivory trade. Because, of course, as soon as we use the word trade, economics becomes important. It’s all about supply and demand.
East Asia, particularly China, is well known for being the epicentre of ivory demand nowadays (although remember it was only a century ago that Britain held that inauspicious title). Ivory carving has a long tradition in China and Japan, and great cultural value is placed on ivory works of art. In such countries, owning ivory is a status symbol, much like owning diamonds or fast cars, and so it is not surprising that as Asian economies grew and personal wealth increased, so did the demand for ivory. And as demand increased, so did rates of poaching, to maintain supply.
Asian elephants are even more endangered than African elephants, with only 40,000 left. As elephant numbers in Asia dwindled, it became more and more difficult for poachers to kill them, and so they turned to Africa for their supplies. Demand reduction is therefore key to reducing poaching in Africa. To borrow a phrase used by many anti-poaching charities: ‘When the buying stops, the killing can too.’
There is some good news that this is already beginning to happen. Economic growth in China has slowed since about 2012 – the Chinese economy is still growing, and much faster than the US, UK, or other European economies – but at a slower rate than between 2008 and 2011.
Coinciding with a slowing Chinese economy, poaching rates have fallen slightly. They are still too high, but thankfully they are lower than the peak rate recently observed in 2011. The economic slowdown in China may well mean that people are less keen to buy luxury status symbols, so demand is falling. But this is a very precarious state, and we can’t assume it will last too long. As soon as the Chinese economy picks up, so too might demand, and therefore the killing. Elephants can’t afford for us to rely simply on global economic slowdowns to protect them.
Anti-poaching strategies vary across Africa. These range from direct action in the form of on-the-ground enforcement; wildlife protection agencies, ranger services and military-style protection units. Even within these organisations there is massive diversity in tactics, operational procedures and goals. Some are armed, others are not. Some have a shoot-to-kill policy, whereas others rely on a mere deterrent. Some prefer uniformed guards, and others implement undercover policing.
Several countries in Africa are trialling better contraband detection systems at transit points, in airports and border crossings. There are also education programmes in place, trade bans, and more and more ways of addressing the root causes of poaching by alleviating poverty in supply countries.
Within ‘supply countries’ – elephant range states – poaching may be perpetrated on different levels. At the top end there are the organised criminal networks, funded and heavily armed by international syndicates, often linked to corrupt government officials and the regional mafia. These gangs commonly employ individuals or small local groups, who sell the ivory they take on local black markets. These petty criminals are often nothing more than neighbourhood criminals armed with illegal rifles.
Then at the bottom end are the members of tribes, simply keen to escape from poverty, and sometimes armed with only a bow and poisoned arrow or a bag of cyanide. And yet, it is frequently the ones at the bottom, usually with the best justification, that do the most damage, because of the scale of the problem. In countries like Zimbabwe, there have been massive spates of killing that use this prosaic yet deadly method. Poachers bait oranges or even salt licks with cyanide and leave it out in an area where they know that elephants will pass.
The unwitting elephants can’t resist such a treat, and the whole group may eat the poisoned food; entire families or groups then die very painful deaths, even youngsters with no or very small tusks. The killing is indiscriminate and on a mass scale. And to make matters worse, scavengers such as lions, jackals, and vultures that come to feed on the elephant carcasses will then be poisoned too from eating cyanide-laced elephant flesh. Vultures in particular, some species of which are already highly endangered, have been dying in large numbers following such poaching events.
Some poaching is less ad hoc, and even darker – being linked to rebel militia groups. Heavily armed militia from South Sudan, Chad, or northern Uganda have perpetrated many mass killings in central Africa.
In 2012, several hundred elephants were killed in a few months in Cameroon, by well-armed poachers riding on horseback – thought to be Sudanese or Chadian militia. The LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army), led by Joseph Kony and infamous for its violent, forced recruitment of child soldiers, is known to have perpetrated much of the poaching in Garamba and Dzanga between 2011 and 2014. Al-Shabaab militia have also been implicated in some of the poaching occurring in east and central Africa, and the resultant funds have been linked to supporting terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS.
But whether they are acting as part of organised militia groups, or at a more ‘subsistence level’, the increasingly sophisticated weapons being used are extremely bad news for the rangers and staff charged with securing protected areas. Rangers are typically individuals who are interested in wildlife, perhaps graduates of biology, ecology, or tourism courses. Even though they often wear camouflage gear, and many even carry weapons (originally meant to protect them from dangerous animals), they are not usually military personnel. Yet despite their lack of training and combat experience, they have progressively become engaged in an armed conflict where they are expected to fight and shoot at other human beings.
Many reserves now employ special police or army personnel to work alongside and train rangers, as the arms race between poacher and wildlife protection officers has escalated. There is a growing corps of international volunteers, often former military officers and special forces operators from Western armies, who mentor these African wildlife agencies. It has even become an official mission for the British army, who now send teams of regular soldiers to assist in anti-poaching efforts in countries like Gabon, Malawi and Zambia.
It’s a positive move when it comes to implementing immediate action and helping the operational effectiveness of what might otherwise be meaningless academic chatter or political hot air, but it also shows how desperate the situation has become. Many countries have even instigated ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies, which permit or even encourage rangers to take the life of poachers if they are caught inside protected areas. And of course, it endangers more and more people involved in conservation in the process.
The Liwonde National Park in central Malawi is a large wilderness area filled with thick acacia forests, large rocky hills and lots and lots of elephants. Like many British soldiers, it’s an area I know well, having served there myself some fifteen years ago. The British army have used the remote park for a long time, as it’s a perfect place to train in hard, hot and dangerous conditions before being sent off to war.
Sadly, the elephant herds inside the park have recently become easy prey for cross-border poachers from Zambia. For a while there was little to be done, as the criminals sneaked through the bush and stole off with a few tusks undetected. But when these gangs of poachers started arming themselves with better weapons, and the scale of the killing grew, the Malawian government requested the help of the British army to help stop the incursions. Soldiers found themselves going from a routine training exercise to a live operation.
Matthew Talbot, a twenty-two-year-old soldier in the Coldstream Guards, was one of those adventurous souls who was keen to gain as much experience as possible, and volunteered to help in the process. On 5 May 2019, he was on patrol through the bush. Having been trained in all the skills necessary for survival, he was keeping his eyes peeled for the deadly poachers that were on the loose. In a cruel twist of fate, that day he was tragically killed, not, as it happened, by a poacher, but by an elephant. The details are not as important, however, as the fact that he gave his life to help protect this species, as so many others have done before.
It is difficult to obtain accurate figures on how many rangers and poachers are being killed or injured in such conflicts across the continent, but one estimate suggests at least two rangers are dying per week in the line of duty. Not that it undermines any sense of the tragedy, but the number of police officers killed on duty in the UK averages fewer than two a year since 2000.
There are other human consequences of this militarisation, too. There have been a number of worrying reports that some already marginalised communities – such as the Baka ‘pygmies’ of DRC – have been victimised at the hands of government officials, receiving verbal and even physical abuse for merely being suspected of harbouring or protecting poachers. The psychological costs of these wildlife wars – on rangers, police, armed forces and local tribal communities – should not be underestimated or ignored.
It may be easy to disparage and detest the individuals who pull the trigger or lay the poison to kill an elephant, but many of them are simply seeking a decent income in a difficult world. Poverty is the key driver of poaching at the local level. The real bad guys, as with so many illegal activities, are the kingpins leading the organised crime syndicates that buy up, smuggle out, and sell on the ivory in bulk. And it really must be organised; the volumes of ivory being exported in blocks, passing through various customs points in regular transit routes, indicate some very sophisticated planning indeed.
Not all ivory reaches the consumer countries in this way – plenty of people are arrested at airports across Africa each year with a few small tusks or pieces of carved ivory bought on the black market shoved down their trousers, or hidden in a suitcase. But ivory has increasingly been seized in large shipments.
Reports from CITES (the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) – the global body tasked with tracking and regulating the international ivory trade, among many other things – show that whilst poaching rates have been in decline since 2011, seizures of illegal ivory are hitting record highs: 2013 and 2015 saw the greatest volume of illegal ivory seized since 1989. The countries of origin or elephant populations that the seized ivory came from can now be determined through the use of advanced DNA analysis techniques. As expected from poaching rates, much of it analysed so far comes from the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Tanzania and Central African Republic.
This increase in seizures of large-scale ivory shipments could purely be a result of better detection and enforcement – i.e. more ivory is being found because customs officials are getting better at finding and reporting it. However, it could also indicate that the crime syndicates responsible for much of the illegal flow are smuggling more ivory, possibly because they are getting cocky, or perhaps getting twitchy, and they want to get it to the destination countries as soon as possible.
Syndicates obviously want to sell ivory for the highest prices possible, and the rarity of a product is a tried-and-tested way to increase its price. In essence, ivory syndicates have been speculating on elephants becoming extinct. They want their finite product to become even scarcer, so that the prices of their stockpiles become wildly high. But now these crime syndicates may be involved in a mass sell-off, recognising that as enforcement strategies improve, their risks of getting caught are more likely, following some high-profile arrests made recently in Kenya and Tanzania.
The syndicates may also be realising that the world is not going to allow the extinction of elephants that they were banking on, so the ivory they have stockpiled is never going to be worth the crazy sums they were hoping for – and as demand falls, its reserve value is decreasing all the time. So maybe they are thinking it is better to sell it now, getting it off their hands whilst there is still some demand.
Decreasing demand is almost certainly related to economic downturns, but I think it would be wrong to disregard the effects of public demand reduction and awareness campaigns across consumer countries. The global outcry about ivory poaching has been considerable and effective.
For example, the remarkably tall 7ft 6in Chinese basketball star, Yao Ming, teamed up with the charities Save the Elephants and WildAid to produce ad campaigns in China explaining what the demand for ivory was doing to elephants in Africa. The charity Tusk Trust, whose patron is HRH the Duke of Cambridge, has fought tirelessly for years to lobby the Chinese government to stop the trade. Before such campaigns, 70 per cent of Chinese people surveyed did not know that elephants had to die to relinquish their tusks for the ivory trade. This number now seems to have fallen substantially. And as more Chinese people realise that their desire for ivory is killing elephants, fewer want to own ivory pieces.
Bowing to growing public awareness and pressure, many nations have now banned their domestic ivory trade, or are in the process of doing so. Domestic trade in ivory has long been known to form an effective mask for poached and illegally smuggled ivory. In 2016, President Barack Obama instigated a near total ban on ivory sales within the US. It is still legal to own ivory – heirlooms and antiques can be kept and passed on – but sales of any ivory that is not antique (defined in the US as more than 100 years old) are prohibited.
Importantly, China then followed suit, announcing its own domestic ivory ban that was enacted in 2017. Sixty-seven state-sanctioned ivory-carving workshops and retail shops were closed in March 2017, and a further 105 were closed by the end of 2017. As soon as the intention to enact a ban in China was announced, ivory prices began to fall – from the peak of $2,100 per kilo of unworked, raw ivory in 2014, to $730 per kilo in 2017. And so far, the fall seems to be continuing.
The UK also drew up legislation to ban domestic sales of ivory in 2018, which should be enacted into law by the end of 2019, and the EU is increasingly being lobbied to consider similar bans. Prince William even called for all the ivory in Buckingham Palace to be destroyed as a show of his commitment to the cause.
It is not all good news, though. About one in five Chinese ivory buyers are considered ‘diehard’, having stated that the domestic ban will not stop them from buying ivory. At least some of the market in China now appears to be moving (illegally) to Cambodia and Laos – particularly the Golden Triangle, an infamously lawless opium-growing hotspot that spreads across neighbouring Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). And Japan, the other major ivory-consumer country, remains determined to keep its domestic market open.
International trade in ivory has been criminalised since 1989, so almost all new ivory entering retail markets outside of elephant range states is illegal. Almost. Of course, hunters can import trophy tusks, requiring explicit CITES permission to do so, but as they are personal trophies, they do not usually end up being traded in domestic markets. However, substantial quantities of ivory have legally entered Chinese and Japanese markets since 1989, from the two CITES-sanctioned ‘one-off’ sales.
The first of these, agreed upon by CITES member countries in 1997, allowed Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe to sell 50 tonnes of ivory – held in government stockpiles, and obtained from natural deaths and culling practices – to Japan. The sale took place in 1999, and it raised $5 million in revenue for the three countries. Then in 2007, CITES parties again agreed to allow the same three countries plus South Africa to sell 107 tonnes to Japan and China. This second sale, which took place in 2008, generated $15 million for the four southern African nations.
The idea was that these sales would flood Chinese and Japanese domestic markets with ivory, keeping the price low and therefore mitigating against future incentives to poach. Only it didn’t quite work out like that.
Instead of a flood – releasing all the legally acquired ivory at once – China sold it to carvers in a trickle, and at greatly inflated prices. Along with the message that it is okay to buy ivory, this tactic immediately increased desire for ivory, by making it rare and expensive, at a time when more Chinese people had greater expendable incomes for buying luxury items. The conditions were ripe for an illegal black market to take off, and boy did it take off, as we have seen.
This is where the economics of the ivory trade becomes especially muddy. Some argue that it was the 1989 ban itself that drove up the price and status of ivory, by making the product rare and therefore more desirable. Perhaps this is the case, but recent analysis does show that ivory prices globally and within Asia were stable or falling between 1989 and the one-off sales. More significantly, the rates of killing and poaching of elephants dropped off dramatically after the 1989 ban, and only increased substantially in 2008, after the two one-off sales.
Whilst some people still deny the link, or argue that we cannot draw conclusions on the basis of one coincidence in time, many anti-trade proponents argue that it was very simply the one-off sales that stoked demand, resulting in the terrifying rates of elephant poaching we have been seeing in the past decade or so.
At the same time as the 1989 ban was imposed, Kenya burnt its 12-tonne stockpile of seized ivory. I remember watching it on the news in awe as a child. This visually arresting event was meant to signal to the world that ivory was off-limits, that it was not a valuable, tradeable commodity any longer. Ivory does not burn easily, but Kenya wanted an image that would be difficult to forget. They hired Hollywood special effects pyrotechnicians to design a suitable mechanism, and the images are indeed iconic. And disturbing.
At the time, it was a controversial move – and remains so to date – with opponents arguing that destroying stockpiles only makes ivory rarer and so pushes prices up even higher, making poaching yet more lucrative and tempting. And whilst many other people agreed with Kenya’s viewpoint, they found the burn itself very distressing, to think that these elephants had all been poached for nothing, with their ivory becoming a pile of ash.
Ignoring the controversy, Kenya remains resolute in its view that changing the perspective is key, that the world needs to stop viewing ivory as a commodity, and instead see it as something that belongs to elephants only. An increasing number of countries have since staged similar burns, or crushes of ivory. To date, nearly 250,000 kg of ivory have been crushed, burned, or both, in more than twenty different countries across Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe, with the single largest event happening in 2016, when Kenya set fire to its entire 105-tonne stockpile of seized ivory, representing an estimated 8,000 dead elephants.
Despite the coincidence in the one-off sale, rising ivory prices, and increased poaching – and the recent fall in ivory prices and reduction in poaching as demand has fallen – there are still many economists, politicians, and conservationists who are calling for the legalisation of international ivory trading, or at the very least for further ‘one-off’ sales.
Their argument goes that southern African states have robust elephant populations, as they have managed to protect their elephants from the poaching menace that has hit central and east African countries so badly. Because they are more ‘successful’ at protecting their elephants, they should be allowed to benefit economically from them – by selling further ivory stockpiles; using the money generated to fund more conservation initiatives and development projects to alleviate rural poverty.
How successful these countries are at conserving elephants is open to debate, with recent analyses from the Great Elephant Consensus team suggesting that whilst still relatively low, poaching rates are increasing in Botswana. Literally on the first day of my walk across that country, I came across a dead elephant carcass with its face hacked off on the banks of the Chobe river. The same rise has been reported in South Africa. But at its core, the debate on legalising trade in ivory is about generating the financial resources that are needed for conservation and rural development.
One analysis found that, when considered in the context of national economies, protected areas in Africa are more than a hundred times more expensive to manage than similar areas in Europe, so the need to generate substantial funding for conservation in Africa could be a compelling argument.
The southern African nations that want to trade in ivory legally (still Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) argue that it is imperialist, condescending and racist for the rest of the world to dictate how they manage their ‘healthy’ elephant populations – especially when Europeans hunted our own large mammals to extinction in the past millennium. This kind of pejorative name-calling has gained more traction than you might imagine, as the underlying argument seems reasonable: shouldn’t countries be allowed to make sovereign decisions about their own natural resources?
But the major problem with that line of argument is that elephants are not a static resource. They are living, breathing, moving animals that inhabit thirty-two other African nations, beyond the five that want to trade in them. Other nations that, to differing extents, do not have such stable populations, and some of which do not have the capacity to police further poaching epidemics.
There is no evidence to think that legal trade from southern Africa would result in the cessation of illegal ivory markets. In fact, I struggle to think of any legally traded products that do not have a parallel illegal trade. Arms, oil, diamonds, cigarettes, alcohol, prescription drugs, wood, pets, money, even music and films (with pirate DVDs now being replaced by illegal downloads and VPNs), all have thriving black markets or suffer from illegal products being laundered into legal markets.
Capacity and corruption are significant factors that would further limit the viability of any legal international trade in ivory. The temptation to exploit the system and launder illegal ivory into the market could be great, given that it would be all too easy to do. Fraudulent activity is conceivable at any and every link in the chain, from wildlife officials, transport-service providers, customs officials, retail-outlet staff, and even political players, each of whom can ease the path in return for some easy cash.
It would take only one or two ‘bad apples’ to allow massive quantities of illegal ivory into the market, and once it was there, it would be very difficult and costly to detect and remove, and the illegal trade could continue to flourish. The risk that legal trade could not be adequately regulated, policed, and controlled is great. Too great.
Yet there is one other, somewhat surprising source of ivory that is currently entering the market legal: that of mammoths! As the arctic tundra in northern Russia becomes more accessible – with permafrost melting and receding ever further – frozen, preserved mammoth carcasses are being found increasingly readily. The tusks can be legally removed and sold internationally because mammoths, as an extinct species, do not fall under CITES remit. But again, the problem is that it is extremely difficult to distinguish elephant ivory from mammoth ivory by eye alone, so already a lot of illegal elephant ivory is being relabelled as ‘mammoth ivory’ and sold without restriction.
Any increases in mammoth ivory trade, which could see considerable growth as people realise it is a legal way of buying and owning ivory, is likely to result in further laundering of illegal elephant tusks, and so push up poaching rates again. For this reason, Israel drafted a proposal to introduce mammoths as a CITES listed species – a controversial move for many, who argued how can an already extinct species be considered an ‘endangered species’? The proposal was withdrawn from the last CITES meeting before it was debated, presumably because it was clear there was not much support for it, but this is an important issue that needs further consideration if we want to avoid any further increases in elephant poaching.
Legal trade simply does not extinguish illegal trade, and there is no economic, sociological, or biological reason to think that an ivory trade is going to be the exception. To what extent legalisation will increase demand for illegal ivory is perhaps more open to debate, but it will certainly not eradicate the demand. That means that any future legal trade from southern Africa is likely to further imperil – if not finally eliminate – elephants right across Africa.
It is for this reason that the largest coalition of countries lobbying and voting against the perpetual CITES proposals to permit sales from southern Africa are, in fact, other African nations. Kenya, Benin, and Burkino Faso are particular leaders, but thirty-two east, central, and west African countries – the ‘African Elephant Coalition’ – vote together on these issues at CITES meetings, vociferously opposing any further legal sales. Which also rather negates the imperialism arguments.
In a countermove, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, and possibly other southern African nations, are threatening to withdraw from CITES altogether, so they can resume trading in ivory (and other animal products) without restriction. Selling internationally would require their potential trading partners to also withdraw from CITES, which may or may not happen. But it is clear this issue is reaching boiling point.
How damaging would parallel legal and illegal trades be for elephants, if legal ivory trade was allowed, or the southern African nations did withdraw from CITES and resume trade? A recent analysis attempted to answer exactly this question by – unusually – looking not only at economic factors that influence trade, such as demand and sales, but also taking elephant demographics and biology into account. For example, the fact that there are two sexes of elephants, that these two sexes occur in different proportions and grow tusks at differing rates, and that the elephants with the most desirable tusks are the oldest and least numerous in any population. The results are not good.
The mathematical modelling showed that even with very low harvest rates, which would only satisfy low demand – and no parallel illegal trade or corruption – offtake soon became unsustainable and resulted in the extinction of the modelled population. For the population of 1,360 elephants used in the model, under the very best scenarios only 100–150 kg could be taken annually, and only if no poaching was occurring at the same time.
Given estimates of global consumer demand – based on poaching rates – and the current size of the continental elephant population, the perhaps achievable sustainable harvest rate of 100–150 kg of ivory from this population is at least three-to-six times lower than it would need to be from populations of this size to meet current demand.
In short, they showed that demand cannot be met with a sustainable ivory yield: any legal trade at current rates of demand will result in extinction.
One other form of trade that has been pursued by some southern African countries has been trade in live elephants – selling them to zoos in Asia, Europe, and the US. Zimbabwe has been particularly active in this regard, selling hundreds of calves to zoos in China. Namibia has made similar sales of fewer animals, as has Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Many of these sales involve the capture of juveniles exclusively, which entails removing them from their families and sending them into captivity where they grow up without elders. The ‘lucky’ ones may get to live in the presence of an unknown, unrelated, older elephant, who has already been in captivity for many years.
The issue of keeping elephants in captivity could be a book in itself, suffice to say the practice comes with some fairly obvious welfare and ethical concerns. But the southern African states selling the elephants into captivity use a familiar defence: they have lots of elephants, and they need to raise money for expensive conservation programmes, so selling a few to fund the many is a necessary sacrifice. But not a sacrifice that much of the world supports any more, it would seem. At the CITES meeting in August 2019, the member countries voted in favour of essentially banning all live capture and removal of wild elephants into captive facilities.
Wild African elephants can now only be moved to other range-state countries, i.e. not outside Africa. Zoos in America, Asia, and Europe can no longer take elephants from the wild. You can probably imagine how Botswana, Eswatini, Namibia, and Zimbabwe feel about this loss of potential revenue. And how ecstatic welfare organisations are about the idea that no more elephants will be put through the trauma of being forcibly removed from their family and environment and shoved into a very confined space for the rest of their lives.
The illegal trade in ivory – and therefore elephant poaching – is not as easy to curb, but legalising trade is unlikely to be the silver bullet. The 183 countries that are party to CITES meet every three years to discuss and make amendments to trade deals in the 5,800 endangered animal and 30,000 endangered plant species that fall under its remit. Yet discussions at every meeting for the past two decades have been dominated by one or two species, of which elephants are arguably the most emotive and controversial. The same arguments and proposals are raised repeatedly, with pro- and anti-ivory trade sides refusing to budge.
Calls have been made for some kind of compromise, but it is hard to see what that could be, as any degree of legal ivory sale could have devastating consequences for elephants. More promisingly, I think, a change of focus is being suggested. Continued efforts to reduce ivory demand are necessary, to ensure the gradual decline in sales and poaching continue until they reach minimal levels that do not adversely affect elephant population numbers. But alternative, ethical ways of raising revenue to fund costly conservation programmes must also be developed, so that all African range states can better conserve the elephants that remain, and especially so that southern African states stop feeling hard done by.
Importantly, the livelihoods of people living alongside elephants in range states must be improved, and corruption tackled, so that the temptation to poach is greatly reduced. A longer-term perspective is necessary, which leaves polarising discussions about trading elephants and their ivory behind. As more people become aware of the consequences of the trade in illegal ivory, one would hope that elephants stand a chance of survival. But there’s another threat to elephants that in this day and age is perhaps even more emotive to those leading the conversation: trophy hunting.
†† At an average of 12 tonnes per year, these seizures are obviously much smaller than the weights of ivory that were being legally exported from Africa in Victorian times. But remember that the amount that is seized by customs and law-enforcement officials represents only a portion of the total ivory that is being smuggled out of Africa now, and that as tusk size has decreased, the number of elephants that have died to make up one tonne of ivory is now likely much higher than it was in the nineteenth century.