BUSINESS MAVERICK: OP-ED: A solution to the ivory trade conundrum: Buy it and burn it

About every three years, the “white gold” known as ivory becomes a red-hot conservation and animal-welfare issue. It is always bubbling, given well-founded concerns about elephant poaching. But it really hits the radar screens when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species , which is effectively a UN treaty, holds its Conference of the Parties .

Debates around ivory are always emotional, not least because elephants are large, social and intelligent animals, so they pull the heartstrings of modernat least those of us who don’t have to live in close and dangerous proximity to them. Policies need to rise above emotion and be implemented in a way that benefits both people, especially the rural poor who bear the brunt of human-wildlife conflict, and wildlife.

But the sunlight would soon be deflected by the advancing sylvan tide. Even as Selous was putting pen to paper in the early 20th century, Chobe’s elephant numbers were fast dwindling. By the 1930s, there was only one breeding herd left. In the 1960s and 1970s, tourists found an environment thick with a tangled mass of vegetation and cover that Selous and other 19th-century ivory hunters in the vicinity would not have recognised.

Like campaigns to shame consumers from wearing fur, anti-ivory campaigners want to drive home the point that your carving or bracelet was pried from the carcass of a poached elephant. The aim is to make ivory unacceptable as an item of consumption. Any sales of legal stockpiles will send the opposite message while presenting opportunities for laundering.

In countries with reputations for graft and poor governance , it is plausible that not everything gets put to the torch, with the burning used as a smokescreen to secretly sell some of the stockpile. On the opposite spectrum of IFAW, organisations such as the pro-hunting group Safari Club International have noted that forensic evidence required in criminal cases may go up in smoke at ivory burns, allowing poachers who would otherwise face prosecution to strike another day.

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