CENTRE POINT
Strange but true: the British Government has drawn up a European elephant policy
SIMON JENKINS
Last week a conference chaired by the British environment department was held in Botswana to draw up a European ele- phant policy — I joke not. This will be dis- cussed at next month's European elephant summit, which precedes the following month's world summit of the UN Conven- tion on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The object of the exercise 11s to stop the ivory trade. This cause is so impracticable, so illiberal, and so hostile to the cause of elephant conservation that Only the United Nations and the European Union could have clasped it to its breast. Nowadays no market seems free from a British minister stamping on it. Since the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, decided to spend the rest of his term of office abroad, other Whitehall departments have seized control of foreign policy. The Home Secretary, believe it or not, is just back from two weeks trying to halt cocaine pro- duction in Latin America. His method was to offer free motorbikes to the natives and raise the price of cocaine on the streets of Britain. Now John Gummer is sending his Officials to Botswana to halt a trade in which Britain has no interest, in ivory from Africa to the Far East.
I once attended a UN conservation con- ference in Botswana. A group of European and American lobbyists sat around the Gabarones Sheraton deploring the Third World's disregard of their 'agenda'. The trouble with Johnny Chinaman, they said, was his infatuation with rhino horn as a sex object. As for the darkies, they just wouldn't do what they were told. Give them a machine-gun to shoot poachers and they used it to shoot elephants. They were inter- ested only in money. Outrageous. Mr Gummer's excursion into foreign affairs is directed at November's CITES debate on `downlisting' the elephant from `totally endangered' to 'less endangered'. This will be opposed by American and European lobbyists whose fund-raising must portray the elephant as a 'charismatic megaspecies' on the brink of extinction. Raymond Bonner told in his recent book on animal politics, At the Hand of Man, that when conservationists explained to Ameri- can fund-raising consultants that elephants were not endangered they were told to shut up. There followed a hysterical campaign about the elephant 'holocaust', aimed mainly at children. Every comic and televi- sion programme was awash with blood, maimed corpses and disembodied tusks.
At a UN conference in Lausanne in 1989, African countries which derived revenue from elephant products were press-ganged by the West into supporting endangered status for the elephant and a total ivory ban. They were even threatened with the withdrawal of economic aid. The lobbyists felt good and prospered while the Africans who had traded in elephant products either poached or starved. Nobody thought to compensate the latter for their loss of for- eign currency. Richard Leakey in Kenya was induced to burn $3 million worth of ivory as a publicity stunt, money which might have financed elephant conservation.
The African elephant, a beast of unri- valled glory, was never endangered. Its appearance on the CITES list was pure pol- itics, to aid the greed of international wildlife organisations. There was certainly a threat from poaching in parts of East Africa, but because of a political break- down in law and order. Today there are hundreds of thousands of African ele- phants and numbers in southern Africa are rising. Elephants cannot cohabit with cows or arable farming. They eat vast quantities of trees and bush. (In the 1970s elephants had to be wiped out from the Rwandan rain-forest to save the gorilla habitat.) Numbers must be curtailed.
What is ludicrous is that poor African communities should be banned by rich western countries from profiting from the process and the product of such culling. Europeans profit by killing rare and possi- bly 'endangered' stag, boar and bear. Why should Africans not profit from elephants? The latest lunacy discussed in Botswana is to allow countries with too many elephants to trade in their meat and hides but not in their ivory. The argument is that these fetch lower prices than ivory and are thus `okay'. As to what should become of the ivory that accompanies the meat and hides, the global super-planners do not say. Africans are as yet unfamiliar with Common Agriculture Policy logic. When a European tells them they may sell their straw but burn their grain, they question that European's sanity. African states now have untradeable ivory stocks of some 500 tons. Sudan desper- ately wants to sell its stock to pay for devel- opment. No, says the UN, which rates ivory- dealing as akin to heroin-pushing. Sooner or later this dam will burst.
Time was when the Florida alligator was endangered. Then somebody began mar- keting alligator-skin shoes. The brutes are now everywhere. Ivory is an exquisite prod- uct. Its smooth surface and rich colouring delight the pianist, the snooker player and the chess enthusiast. If varieties are found to be aphrodisiac in Japan, lucky Japan. I can understand, just, those who refuse to eat or use any animal product, big or small. But to single out the horn fibres of the ele- phant and rhinoceros as uniquely inappro- priate is absurd.
The justification for the ivory ban was to `save the elephant'. The best way to save any animal is to make its salvation commer- cially advantageous. Elephants will become extinct only when there is no market for them. Some zealots hope that tourism alone will save the African elephant. Per- haps some will survive the cow farmers and poachers in zoos, surrounded by electric fences and armed warders. But numbers will eventually dwindle if Africans have no interest in sustaining herds and exploiting their value. This is primarily a function of hunting and ivory.
I could not kill big game. But when I was recently in South Africa I met a rancher who told me that for the price of one black rhino shot by a hunter each year he could (and did) raise five baby ones. Camera safaris, with their hotels, buses and huge water consumption, were steadily wrecking the bush ecology. Licensed hunting and ivory were the keys to wildlife conservation. To deny Africans the revenue of the cull was confiscatory and patronising. It was moral neo-imperialism. It was senseless.
I saw his point.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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