Does destroying ivory save elephants?

Daniel Stiles, a member of the IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group, wrote a blog for the Guardian in November in which he said destroying ivory might send a symbolic message to voters about governmental commitment to stamp out the ivory trade, but the message the poachers are getting is quite different.The message is: Ivory is scarce and with stockpile destruction is getting scarcer. The three since 2011 have taken almost 30 tonnes of ivory out of circulation, enough to feed China’s 37 legal ivory factories for five years. Now the US government plans to reduce potential global supply by another 5.4 tonnes. That means, with demand remaining stable, ivory prices will increase. Raw ivory prices in China have doubled since 2011, according to my sources. Poachers and those paying them now have increased incentive to go out and kill more elephants.Ivory workshop owners in high ivory consumption countries such as China and Thailand have already begun buying any and all African ivory they can get their hands on. If stockpiles are going to be destroyed, and legal ivory is unavailable, and more illegal shipments are being seized because of more vigilant law enforcement, workshop owners realise they need to stockpile as many tusks as possible for future use, because the senseless system now in operation in which domestic ivory markets are legal while raw ivory to supply them is illegal, is guaranteeing extinction of the elephant. Those with the most tusks will make the biggest profits as the price of ivory goes through the roof with the demise of the elephant.Why is this economically absurd system in place? Because those advocating it know almost nothing about how the ivory industry operates. For the most part they are zoologists and animal welfare people, whose expertise lies elsewhere. They have not engaged in objective, data-driven research of ivory markets, and they have not learned from published scientific reports on the subject. They speak from preconceived ideology and opinion, not from knowledge.USFWS have never destroyed ivory before and one must ask why are they doing it now? Because they are acting on public opinion, not on scientific knowledge, in violation of their responsibility to conserve wildlife.This blog, published by Scientific American after the US government destroyed its ivory cache last year, outlines the history of ivory destruction and the reasoning behind it.The U.S. is not the first country to destroy its seized ivory. In 1989, Kenya responded to rampant elephant poaching by burning its stockpile. More recently, with poaching surging to record levels of 30,000 elephants or more a year, Gabon and the Philippines have destroyed their ivory, too. The U.S. ivory crush on November 14 followed President Obama’s July 1 executive order calling on government agencies to step up efforts to combat the illegal wildlife trade.[Note: China also destroyed it ivory stockpile in January this year]Experts from government and nongovernment organizations who spoke at the U.S. ivory crush event defended the decision to destroy the stockpile. Peter Knights of WildAid, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in San Francisco, observed that people who argue against the destruction of ivory stockpiles think that having a legal supply is the answer to the poaching problem. But attempts to flood the market with ivory in the past have had disastrous results, actually increasing poaching rather than curbing it.FWS director Daniel Ashe said that another problem with putting more ivory into the legal supply chain is that it would create a smokescreen for illicit trade in ivory, making law enforcement and effective prosecution of criminals more difficult.Destroying ivory stockpiles also makes practical sense, according to Crawford Allan of the World Wildlife Fund and TRAFFIC. In countries that lack the finances to secure their stocks of ivory effectively, he said, corrupt officials are selling it out of the backdoor of the storeroom and into the illegal trade.The root of the problem is soaring demand for ivory in China, which has by far the largest market for the product. Once a luxury few could afford, ivory is now within the financial grasp of the masses, thanks to the explosive growth of the country’s middle class. A recent National Geographic survey of 600 middle and upper middle class Chinese found that 84 percent of respondents planned to buy ivory in the future.(theguardian.com)ANN.Az