Slate Article: eBay and Ivory

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Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2204526

 

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eBay and Ivory

The auction site's ban on elephant products won't help the environment.

By Brendan Borrell

Posted Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008, at 6:42 AM ET

 

If, like me, you have always wanted to get a carved, elephant-ivory snuff

box for that special someone, this holiday season may well be your last

opportunity. The online auction site eBay announced on Oct. 20 that it would

ban nearly all ivory sales on its auction sites effective Jan. 1. Last

month, the company was embarrassed by the International Fund for Animal

Welfare, which estimated that it was hosting an elephant-ivory trade in the

United States worth $3.2 million per year.

 

This may seem like another example of corporate greenwashing—a way for the

auction site to paper over its misdeeds and parade around as a concerned

environmental steward. In fact, the new policy is directly at odds with

mainstream conservationists. Just one week after eBay made its big

announcement, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered

Species—with support from WWF—was going forward with a one-time auction of

government ivory stockpiles from elephants that either died of natural

causes or had been culled in population-control programs in four southern

African countries. These sales netted $15 million, earmarked for elephant

conservation and local community-development programs. Although

international laws governing the ivory trade are complex, the truth is that

most of the ivory being sold on eBay was totally legal. More to the point,

buying ivory online may actually be a good thing for conservation: The more

snuff boxes we demand, the better chance !

that elephants and their ecosystems have to withstand the pressures of

modernization.

 

Wild elephants are never going to be tolerated in Africa so long as locals

cannot profit from the animals' most valuable asset: those 120-pound teeth.

As journalist John Frederick Walker argues in his provocative new book,

Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (to be

published in January), the high regard with which American zoo-goers hold

these proboscideans is not shared by poverty-stricken farmers in Kenya, who

must contend with 4-ton living bulldozers rampaging their cassava fields and

threatening their lives. Flip through African newspapers, and you'll find

lurid headlines describing trampled schoolchildren, panicked villagers, and

nightly curfews. Americans would not put up with life under those

conditions, yet we have imposed this imperial vision on a far-off continent

that we imagine as our private zoo.

 

The elephant problem is equally vexing inside the national parks of

Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, whose burgeoning elephant

populations must be managed to avoid their overwhelming the ecosystem.

Elephants are the largest living land mammal, each consuming as much as 600

pounds of vegetation a day and drinking 50 gallons of water. In 1970, a

hands-off policy to Kenya's elephants in Tsavo National Park provided a

bitter lesson to those who opposed culling. After ravaging the park's

fragile vegetation during a season of drought, elephants began dying by the

thousands. Animals whose meat could have supported the region's desperate

farmers and whose ivory could have provided $3 million for conservation were

rotting in the blazing sun. In the years since, South African wildlife

managers have refined culling procedures to minimize trauma to elephant

family groups, and they catalog and store ivory under lock and key in

anticipation of future auctions.

 

But pragmatic approaches to elephant conservation took a blow in 1989, when

celebrities Brigitte Bardot and Jimmy Stewart joined animal rights campaigns

to fight the " elephant holocaust " being conducted by poachers and, by

implication, wildlife managers. According to Walker, the WWF and the African

Wildlife Foundation " felt it prudent … to keep quiet about the value of

sustainable use policies. " Although no African or Western countries

initially supported a ban on the ivory trade, by the end of the year they

were on the losing end of the battle for public opinion. On Oct. 8, in

Lausanne, Switzerland, CITES listed African elephants as Appendix I,

effectively cutting off ivory sales, putting Asian importers and carving

shops out of business, and turning " white gold " into a social no-no. " In the

aftermath of the decision, " Walker writes, " the ivory market collapsed as

ivory prices plummeted. "

 

The latest effort to humiliate eBay represents another example of an animal

rights organization hijacking the African conservation agenda with an

untenable vision that may do more harm than good. Advocates for a ban on

ivory claim the CITES auction gives unscrupulous traders a chance to launder

poached goods. But a wildlife trade monitoring program set up by WWF and the

International Union for the Conservation of Nature has found that

illegal-ivory seizures have declined in the five years following the last

ivory auction approved by CITES in 1999. It appears that a flush of legal

ivory from these auctions knocks out black-market dealers. While poaching

remains a problem in Central and East Africa, the data suggest that those

activities feed domestic African markets, not online auctioneers in the

United States.

 

Most of the ivory that was being sold on eBay may not have been illegal at

all. A good deal of ivory in the country simply predates the 1989 ban, and

interstate sale of ivory is not tightly regulated or monitored. As for

imports, residents can bring in licensed hunting trophies for personal use

or antique ivory items more than 100 years old. The IFAW report on eBay

simply identified certain auctions as " likely violations " or " possible

violations " of the law, based on the wording used in listings. According to

the study, just 15.5 percent of ivory goods on the site fell into the

" likely violation " category. Turn those figures around, and it's clear that

eBay also supported a vibrant, legal ivory market.

 

The only way to improve this market is through transparency, and eBay was

ideally suited to play such a role. Because the site maintains a database of

every auction, the final sale price, and the parties involved, it could

provide a valuable tool for law-enforcement officers and conservation

organizations. With those data, it would be possible to track the volume of

the ivory trade and help identify questionable buyers and sellers based on

their transaction patterns. Once the market moves offline—and to classifieds

sites such as Craigslist—this sort of monitoring will be largely impossible.

 

If eBay wanted to take a stand for conservation, it should have partnered

with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service—and notified its users that any

purchase or sale of wildlife products will be recorded in a government

database. Add to this the eventual possibility of spot checks using DNA

testing, and we'd be well on our way to a sustainable, digital marketplace.

Given such a framework, ivory would regain its respectability, and it might

even be possible to open our borders to the importation of newly worked

ivory from registered sellers abroad. After two decades under the ban, it's

finally time to admit that saving elephants requires pulling a few

teeth.Related in Slate

 

 

C. Josh Donlan argued for " rewilding " the American West with elephants,

lions, and cheetahs. Mia Fineman discussed a 4-year-old girl who can paint

as well as an elephant. Kent Sepkowitz revealed that George Washington's

dentures were made of " hippopotamus and elephant ivory, held together with

gold springs. " Chris Wilson tried to make it clear that woolly mammoths did

not help build the Pyramids.

 

Brendan Borrell is correspondent for the Scientist and has written about

wildlife for Smithsonian and Natural History. His e-mail address is

bborrell.

 

 

Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

 

 

 

 

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