The Ivory Bandwagon: International Transmission of Interest-Group Politics.

• Author: KAEMPFER, WILLIAM H.

In October 1989 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, voted to classify the African elephant as an endangered species and to make trade in ivory illegal. That policy decision displeased many conservation experts in Africa and elsewhere, who argued that a ban on the ivory trade would prove disastrous for the African elephant. Opponents of the ban favored a free-market approach that would offer rural Africans tangible benefits as an incentive to preserve their elephant herds and would help to compensate for the costs of coexisting with elephants.

The free-market approach presupposes consumptive utilization of elephants, which in turn requires that Africans have access to a market for ivory.(1) The 1989 CITES treaty abolished the legal ivory market, overriding the protests of the scientists and economists who advocated consumptive utilization. The blanket ban on ivory trading prevailed until June 1997, when it was partially lifted, at the request of southern African countries, to allow limited sales of existing ivory stockpiles. Widespread ivory trading remains illegal, however, under the international regime established by the CITES treaty.(2)

How could such a policy have been implemented despite considerable evidence that a ban on ivory trade would have the perverse effect of exacerbating the decline of the African elephant? We try to answer this question by examining the interest-group pressures that led to the CITES decision. We show how lobbying and publicity efforts by a small group of animal-rights activists and preservationists, whose views did not coincide with those of mainstream conservationists, ultimately succeeded in generating broad-based public support for an ivory-trade ban. Our analysis provides a case study of the spread of a political position, publicly articulated, from one interest group to another and even from one country to another. Starting from a very small base of support, a policy with little scientific respectability can easily snowball into a national and international program with unstoppable momentum, and thus tiny special-interest groups can wield an enormously disproportionate degree of influence in the political process.

Elephants: Menace or Treasure?

Elephants can do a considerable amount of damage to livestock and crops, and they are extremely dangerous to humans, more so than most other wildlife. Elephants spend sixteen hours a day eating. An adult bull consumes 300 pounds of trees and 50 gallons of water per day and can weigh more than 5,000 kg. An elephant clan's home range can cover up to three thousand square kilometers, depending on the availability of water and forage (Kreuter and Simmons 1995, 148). "A herd of elephants goes through an area like a slow tornado, snapping off branches and uprooting trees, leaving devastation behind" (Bonner 1993, 101). No wonder that the prevailing sentiment toward elephants among rural African villagers is one of fear (Bonner 1993, 28, 221-23).(3)

Africans who compete with wild animals for land and food have strong incentives to kill them (Kreuter and Simmons 1995, 148). Indeed, rural Africans have traditionally hunted elephants and other game. Hides were used for clothes, shields, and containers, and ivory and rhino horn were carved into ornaments and jewelry. European and Arab traders in East Africa purchased ivory and rhino horn for sale abroad. By the 1950s many East Africans were engaged in widespread commercial hunting to supply meat and skins to growing urban populations (Bonner 1993, 43, 45). Conservation was viewed as a less-than-honorable profession by many Africans, for whom wild animals were a potentially life-threatening liability, and such anti-conservation sentiments led to an escalation of hunting in post-independence Africa (Kreuter and Simmons 1995, 149).

The attitude of rural Africans toward elephant conservation contrasts starkly with that of many Westerners. Africans living among the elephants incur all of the costs of allowing elephants to exist in the wild, but the benefits accrue largely to Westerners, who view elephants as "an important conservation symbol with high aesthetic and emotional appeal" (Kreuter and Simmons 1995, 149). Westerners obtain "existence value" from the elephants, a benefit deriving from the knowledge that elephants continue to exist in the wild even if the Westerners in question will never personally have any contact with them (Kreuter and Simmons 1995, 149; `t Sas-Rolfes 1998, 17).(4)

In 1933 the European powers that had African colonies held aconference in London to discuss conservation. Although some conservationists at the time were motivated by a desire to preserve biological diversity, others were big-game hunters who wanted to ensure a steady supply of wildlife for hunting safaris (Bonner 1993, 39-46). The 1933 conference called for the creation of a system of national parks in which licenses would be required for access to the game, whether for photography or for hunting. The philosophy underlying the parks was one of separating wildlife from indigenous people, thus preserving the wildlife in a pristine state as a part of the country's national heritage and primarily for the benefit of foreign visitors.(5) Human populations were relocated to areas outside the parks, often resulting in disruption of their agricultural economies and consequent impoverishment.(6)

But the notion that wildlife and rural Africans can be separated is fundamentally flawed. Elephants in particular are notoriously difficult to confine, and they have broken through virtually every type of barrier, including electric fences, which they tear down with their tusks. Any barrier that might successfully keep elephants within a large perimeter would require a technology far too expensive for rural Africa (Bonner 1993, 215-16). By roaming around in agricultural areas adjacent to the parks, the elephants became pests to African farmers and ranchers, who were then even more inclined to shoot them. This issue of animal damage to agriculture is important for the survival of wildlife species, especially inasmuch as 80 percent of Kenya's wildlife live outside parks; for elephants in Africa as a whole the figure is 50 percent (Kreuter and Simmons 1995, 158; Bonner 1993, 223).

Another problem with the separation approach is that the parks require game wardens or rangers to enforce laws against hunting and poaching. But African countries are among the poorest in the world, and expenditures on maintaining and protecting the parks are low.(7) The consensus among conservationists is that, ideally, $400 per square kilometer must be spent annually to protect elephants and rhinoceroses from poachers and that at least one ranger per fifty square kilometers is required. Yet in the late 1980s Kenya, one of the wealthier countries in sub-Saharan Africa, was spending $10 per square kilometer in Tsavo National Park, and Zambia had only one warden per four hundred square kilometers of parks. At $400 per square kilometer, Tanzania would require $48 million annually to adequately protect its parks; that country's actual wildlife expenditure in 1991 was less than $5 million. Tanzania was paying its game rangers a salary of about $30 per month, and Zambia less than $20 per month (Bonner 1993, 93-94, 195).

With such low wages and minimal resources for law enforcement, it is not surprising that corruption is rampant among game wardens and other officials in Africa's parks. In East Africa in particular, corruption in game parks is so entrenched that it has severely undermined conservation efforts. Game wardens are easily bribed to ignore, and even assist, poachers.(8) Poorly paid rangers poach out of desperation for food and to support their families. Local officials have skimmed about 40 percent of the entrance fees paid by visitors to Kenya's Maasai Mara. Some of the large lodges in the park have routinely underreported occupancy rates in order to avoid remitting taxes to the authorities (Bonner 1993, 134-36). In all countries where poaching has been a serious problem--Tanzania, Kenya, Congo, Zambia--government officials at the highest levels have been involved in the ivory trade (Simmons and Kreuter 1989, 47).(9)

In 1977 such corruption forced Kenya to ban hunting altogether.(10) The hunting ban resulted in the forfeiture of significant revenues for Kenya, because the going price for hunting an elephant in South Africa is $12,000, and a rhino fetches $28,000 (Anderson and Hill 1995, xii). In 1989 a pair of uncarved elephant tusks sold for an average of $2,000 (Simmons and Kreuter 1989, 47).

Few of the benefits of the parks trickle down to rural Africans living in the vicinity. Unless they become poachers themselves, rural Africans typically see little benefit from wildlife conservation. Pervasive corruption siphons off the revenues to officials at all levels of government, and only a small fraction of tourism earnings accrues to local residents. More than 100,000 tourists a year visit Kenya's Maasai Mara, generating millions of dollars in revenue. Yet a 1988 study of the Mara found that less than 10 percent of gross tourism revenues accrued to the locals (Bonner 1993, 220). Although the benefits to adjacent villagers are elusive, those villagers pay the price of living with the wildlife: their personal security and property are constantly threatened by marauding wild animals.

Quite apart from poaching, attempts to contain wildlife in parks and nature reserves have sometimes turned out to be disastrous because of habitat imbalances that are created when numerous species are confined in a given area. Unable to range widely across the countryside in search of food, elephants put enormous pressure on the land in the parks. They destroy trees and other vegetation, leaving the land exposed to the elements. By the late 1960s the elephant...