Environmental Cooperation and Institution Building on the Ivory Trade

By: Sydney Grad

The African Bush Elephant is the world’s largest land animal and it plays a pivotal role in the African ecosystem as a unique ‘keystone’ species and natural habitat engineer. Five hundred years ago, an estimated 10 million elephants populated Africa’s forests and savannas, by the 1980s, the elephant population was estimated to be about one-twentieth of that figure. With figures of the unsustainable poaching and illegal selling of ivory being released to the public, the Ivory Free Campaign was created and gained traction in the 1980s within the United States. It was a movement quickly taken up by worldwide NGOs to promote the end of ivory sales and the murdering of elephant populations in Africa, which faced extinction at current rates but the fight to ban ivory and poaching continues until today.

The historical process of capital accumulation and production has contributed to current environmental degradation. Economic liberalization, by its design, uses market forces and the principle of self-regulated markets to address problems. The rise of environmentalism and growing attention to the crisis in the industrialized world in the 1960s had enormous significance for debates about the role of ecology and conservation in development. There were perceptions that there were environmental issues of global significance that markets were neither addressing but rather causing. This is a problem that can only be solved with a global effort, not through nationalist means.

African governments attempted to combat smuggling and illegal poaching of elephants within their territory, but many lacked the resources. The lack of regional resources to respond coupled with growing political turbulence and easy access to automatic weapons, greatly reduced African governments’ abilities to protect elephant herds and enforce poaching laws. Organized criminal syndicates seeing the rise in prices and the global demand, started shipping several tons of ivory at a time to markets in Asia, and hundreds of elephants were killed for every container sent.

The devastating effects of these poaching and smuggling practices did not go unnoticed and pressure to create regulations and laws was mounting. Entering into force on July 1, 1975, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), was enacted to regulate the international trade of endangered plants and animals. With the creation of CITES, new regulations and sanctions were created, one of the most important being that of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species which now considers poaching and wildlife trafficking as a form of transnational organized crime.

In the late 1980s, the rapidly declining population trend of African elephants appeared to be an unmistakable trend that called for specific drastic action in concern to ivory and poaching.

The political effort to stop elephant poaching began in the United States and soon spread outwards across the international system and into institution building and support. These groups mobilized popular opinion and political support both within the United States and abroad; they stimulated and assisted in the creation of like-minded organizations in other countries; and they played a significant role in spreading their objective within their own government.

A major lobbying campaign by environmental NGOs resulted in the passage of the United States’ African Elephant Conservation Act of 1988 (AECA). This act requires the Secretary of the Interior to conduct an investigation of all ivory-producing states to determine which states had effective elephant protection programmes. On June 1, 1989, the United States announced a unilateral suspension on the importation of all ivory. France, West Germany and the European Community taking heed of the United States, declared similar bans.

CITES was effectively able to relabel the status of the African elephant by placing it on its Appendix I list as a species threatened with extinction. This was instrumentally important to not only highlight on an international level the extent of the elephant crisis, but by being on the list as an endangered species it prohibits the international trade except where the purpose is non-commercial, such as for scientific research. Consequently, with the unilateral ban by the United States and its domino effect on other states it directly lead to the African elephant’s reassignment, and CITES was able to ban all international commercial trade in ivory in 1989. This ban coupled with Resolution Conference 10.10: Trade in African Specimens, created two crucial programs, CITES Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (“MIKE”) and Elephant Trade Information System (“ETIS”) which are comprehensive course of action plans and programs to mitigate the crisis and go forward both in maintaining the ban and ensuring compliance and protection for the elephants. Within one year of the ban’s implementation the demand for ivory began to drop. Its prices also began to drop and become less valuable as the demand from the rest of the world fell, dissuading poachers and illegal trading to continue.

While the international trade ban in ivory has succeeded in reversing the decline in the African elephant population, it has not been uniformly successful across states. Poachers in some African range states have greater access to ‘unregulated’ domestic markets for ivory, usually facilitated by corruption and civil war. As a response, the next step is to coordinate at the domestic level an internal ban. This continued movement has already seen success in the United States, which on July 6, 2016 instituted a near-total ban on commercial trade in African elephant ivory, with China, one of the world’s largest ivory markets, following a year later with a ban on all domestic ivory sales. The United States and global NGOs are continuing to work to have other countries meet the same expectations, as the existence of unregulated markets internally, despite the international ban, has left open a loophole for poachers, traders and carvers that they continue to exploit by smuggling in newly collected ivory and passing it off as antique. Global institutions can truly make a difference after all.