ELEPHANTS & IVORY

© IFAW/N. Greenwood/Mangochi District, Malawi
conservation, first and foremost, without diluting
their efforts by getting involved in other issues,
about which they have no particular knowledge
or expertise. And besides, there is no shortage of
advocates for economic development and poverty
alleviation. 102
This point was made over 20 years ago, at the
opening session of the 18 th assembly of IUCN – The
World Conservation Union 103 in Perth, Australia. It
was there that His Royal Highness, Prince Phillip –
at the time President of the World Wide Fund for
Nature (WWF) – remarked that:
“the issue of preventing the steady
decline in biological diversity is quite big
and complicated enough without getting
involved in matters beyond the professional
knowledge and expertise of the conservation
movement.
”
He went on to say:
“The need for someone to stand up
and champion nature, and speak for the
Earth with wisdom and insight is urgent.
”
If that “need” was urgent in 1990, it is even
more so today. Conflating conservation with
sustainable development, job creation, livelihoods
and poverty alleviation has become a huge
distraction for global conservation. It has done
little to conserve and better protect ecosystems or
their component parts. And it has largely failed to
create more jobs or alleviate poverty, especially in
the “developing” world. 104
The time has come to get conservation back
on track. The protection and preservation of
wild plants and animals, and the ecosystems
they inhabit, must once again be the foremost
consideration of conservationists everywhere.
CITES & THE INTERNATIONAL IVORY
TRADE 105
Renewed concerns about the status of elephant
populations in parts of Africa and Asia have re-
energized the debate over whether international
trade bans, implemented under CITES, have the
desired effect. 106 That debate is largely another
distraction, however, because it ignores the
ultimate problem: the very existence of any legal
markets for elephant ivory, whether international
or national.
If the goal of conservation today is to protect
elephants from the threats posed by commercial
exploitation and illegal hunting (poaching) for
ivory, and to promote the recovery of depleted
populations, then the only possible solution is to
remove elephant ivory not only from international
trade, but entirely from the global marketplace. 107
If ivory had no commercial value, there would
be little incentive for anyone to kill elephants
for their tusks and one of the major threats to
their survival would eventually disappear. In the
absence of effective legislation banning all trade
and sale of elephant ivory, coupled with effective
enforcement and compliance, the poaching of
elephants for their ivory will assuredly continue.
It is now more than 20 years since African
elephants 108 joined Asian elephants on Appendix
I of CITES, effectively banning (on paper, at least)
the international trade in all elephant products,
including ivory. Since then, however, there have
been a number of deceptively named “one-off”
sales of African elephant ivory from populations
subsequently downlisted to Appendix II, the first
of which occurred in 1999. 109 Following the most
recent round of auctions of stockpiled ivory in
2008, there is now a restricted 9-year moratorium
on international ivory sales. 110
The moratorium has not, however, dampened
enthusiasm in some quarters for further legal
ivory sales. Two proposals to downlist additional
African elephant populations from Appendix I to
Appendix II of CITES, and associated requests for
further “one-off” sales, were considered at the
2010 CITES Conference of the Parties (CoP15)
in Doha, Qatar. While these proposals failed to
receive the necessary two-thirds majority to be
adopted, the two proposals were nonetheless
supported by a majority of Parties casting votes.
More downlisting proposals and further requests
for additional “one-off” sales are anticipated at
the next CITES meeting in 2013.
Meanwhile, as we have already seen, the
poaching of African elephants throughout parts of
their range is on the rise and once again depleted
elephant populations are in further decline. 111
The conclusion offered by some proponents
of the ivory trade is that the current situation
provides further evidence that trade bans do not
protect elephants. Such conclusions ring hollow
because elephant ivory never has been removed
from the marketplace. There is actually no basis
for even testing the hypothesis that a total ban
on trade and sale of ivory would virtually end
the poaching of elephants. Perhaps the only real
surprise is that the original CITES ban in 1989
appeared to reduce poaching, at least for a while. 112
Why is poaching and illicit ivory trading
apparently on the increase again? 113 One
suggestion arises from the fact that the current
55
© FAW/Mangochi District, Malawi