Farming won't save the elephants – Simon Jenkins' premise is a fantasy
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Version 0 of 1. "Ivory is the cocaine of south-east Asia," asserts Simon Jenkins (If you really want to save the elephants, farm them, 14 February). He's right in that ivory and rhino horn, like cocaine, are expensive, and that both trades costs lives. But in almost every other respect his analogy is way off the mark. Global organised crime syndicates ruthlessly exploit the miserable, addictive nature of drugs to make massive profits. But ivory is not a drug; it is not addictive. It is an item of adornment, a middle-class status symbol. The killing is driven by human vanity and greed. Jenkins dismisses the recent high level meeting on illegal wildlife trade as a junket for the elite, bemoaning the "appalling waste" of destroying ivory stocks in the US, China and France (equivalent to "medieval princes burning food to taunt starving subjects"), while failing to report the ivory stockpile destructions undertaken by Africans – in Kenya, Gabon, Zambia and Chad, and soon in Ethiopia and Tanzania. He claims that southern Africans argued against an ivory trade ban and that when this came into force "every prediction made by the Africans was right. Prices soared. In 10 years elephant numbers halved." Wrong. The ban caused the price of illegal ivory to collapse and elephant numbers to stabilise or recover. It was the limited reopening of trade, not the banning of it, that eradicated those hard-won gains. In 2008, more than 100 tonnes of ivory was legally sold from southern African stockpiles to Japan and China, stimulating industrial levels of poaching, massive illegal ivory trade and a tenfold price escalation. Jenkins suggests the recent extraordinary spike in rhino poaching was a result of a 1970s trade ban. "Rhino deaths have gone from a handful a year to more than a thousand, with horns the price per kilo of gold." In fact, it's probably the legalising of rhino trophy-hunting that increased rhino poaching in South Africa from 13 in 2007 to 1,004 in 2013. He asserts that the annual selling of five rhino trophies in Namibia makes "far more than photography tourism could ever generate". However, at best African trophy-hunting generates £120m a year. Kenya accrues £600m annually from non-consumptive wildlife tourism. Last month's summit did not, as Jenkins would have you believe, shackle Africa to the whimsy of a new breed of eco-colonialists. It respected the fact that most African nations don't support a return to ivory or rhino-horn trade, they agree to bear down on organised wildlife crime (which part-funds rebel militias such as the Lord's Resistance Army) launched the Elephant Protection Initiative, and recognise the African Elephant Action Plan – Africa's elephant conservation blueprint – endorsed by all 38 elephant range states. His premise that tusks could be harvested from living elephants is a fantasy. Elephants need their tusks as part of their survival strategy for stripping bark to eat, mining for salt, digging for water. Up to 50,000 elephants gunned down a year – leaving a macabre, putrid mass of bones and skin that stains the African earth after the poachers have gone (and which I have witnessed at first hand time and again); orphaned calves left to starve; entire herds eradicated by the ubiquitous AK47. Africa's conservationists know what to do to save elephants. Farming? No, Mr Jenkins, they are not cattle. |