Trading In Elephants

Conservation of the elephant is one matter that places many African countries such as Kenya and other southern African countries in conflict at the global stage. The essence of these arguments is that there's a surplus of elephants in southern African game reserves in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana. On the other hand, most East and West African countries have had declining elephant populations since the 1960s because of poaching and illegal hunting.

The value of the elephants for these countries is in the revenues from tourism and the possibility that the ivory may be traded. Since it has a market value, there is substantial trade in ivory supported through illegal hunting. At the 14th CITES Conference of Parties, a substantive agenda item was concerned with a review of the moratorium in trade on ivory. Understandably, Kenya and Mali, being countries whose elephant populations continue to face the threat of illegal hunting, proposed an extension of that moratorium while South Africa and Botswana wanted to be able to get rid of existing stocks of ivory in their custody. In the end, a sub-optimal agreement was reached to extend the moratorium for another another twelve years though the final agreement was for an extension of nine years.

In this article on the BBC news site, the South African government announces that it will allow a cull of elephants to control their population. apart from the protests of the conservations groups who claim that this is inhuman and who are opposed to any interference with the animals, it is clear that this state of affairs is far from efficient. As first principles in economics would state, parties do benefit from trade and the east Africans should offer to buy the elephants from the south African nations to boost their own elephant populations and tourism. The revenues generated from toursim could be used to compensate the south African governments in addition to designing systems for the protection of the animals from illegal hunters. It is clear that the mere extension of moratorium after another at the CITES meetings will neither stop illegal hunting to support the demand for ivory. As it appears so far, the South Africans are bearing the burden of an international agreement built from emotive arguments without consideration of trade between the parties.