This post is a comment by Andre DeGeorges to an article by Daniel Stiles in the National Geographic’s website  that was published on September 15, 2014. You can read the article here:   Can Elephants Survive a Continued Ivory Trade Ban?

By: Andre DeGeorges

I still feel a few important issues are ignored in general, even by the sustainable use crowd. The key word is POVERTY and Ron Thomson seems to be the shepherd boy crying wolf and no one is listening. Unless people are lifted out of poverty in Africa, the habitat for elephant and other species will go and more and more elephant will be exterminated either as pests, as revenge killings – like rhino and lion have been in East Africa, and even poached.

Africa’s human majority subsistence population will more than double in the 21st century and along with that will be attempts at increasing their livestock as a source of wealth and food – unless pressure can be taken off these rural areas. As already discussed, Zimbabwean PH Andy Wilkinson coined the phrase “Politics of Despair” with people in a survival mode rotating between the rural areas and urban slums – mining Sub-Saharan Africa’s natural resources

What does this mean:

1. An equitable portion of wealth from elephant and other natural resources must accrue to the people living with the wildlife/timber/strategic minerals, etc. – as opposed to today where the majority goes to governments and the private sector – but to be negotiated with the private sector since at this point in Africa’s development rural people do not have the marketing contacts to make this happen.
2. Foreign aid must change from 70-90% going back to the donor countries via NGOs, consulting firms, so-called “experts”, conditions precedents (e.g., buy America or Europe) and be channelled to remain in Africa for health and education.
3. Like China, a large portion of what is today Foreign Aid must go to subsidizing the West’s private sector in the form of low interest loans, in high risks areas – grants, and even infrastructure – to invest in Africa and help Africa get added value from transformation of a higher percentage of its natural resources in Africa. The existing taxidermy industry in Southern Africa is a good example, as is trophy & biltong hunting. South Africa probably has the largest formal bush meat trade in the world readily available in butcheries throughout the country. Additional added value is obtained from souvenirs and household items made from game skins and horn – from rugs & wall hangings to knife handles, cork screw handles and bottle openers. Zimbabwe’s game skin Courteney boots http://www.courteneyboot.com/shoes.php are world famous among hunters! South Africa has an excellent diamond cutting/jewelry industry and to a lesser degree Tanzania (e.g., tanzanite) and Kenya produce gemstone jewelry. South Africa then has various outlets such as Mervis Diamonds in the U.S. (http://www.mervisdiamond.com/about-mervis ). Added value can happen with many other natural resources such as COLTAN to make microchips and tropical hardwoods to make furniture for export, etc.
4. Salaries must be based upon Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) – not slave wages – that is local cost of living as a means of creating a middle class and taking pressure off the rural areas and adequate pollution controls – unlike the Athi River Industrial area on the edge of Nairobi!!

What this means is that Africa must experience Economic Development, and not just Economic Growth (increasing GDP) as is the case today, if the World wishes to see Africa’s people and wildlife have a future. And yes – if this poverty is not overcome expect to also see an increase in Radical Islam & the political Instability that follows it. As I see it the rise in Radical Islam, Increased Poaching, habitat loss and even the projected increase in population (when you are poor with no retirement & a high infant mortality you have plenty of kids to assure security in old age & besides as in my Mom’s generations – her 11 brothers and sisters were cheap farm labor), & mass migrations out of Africa into Europe and South Africa are indices of Poverty that if not overcome will lead to increased poverty, political chaos and the demise of Africa’s unique biodiversity and charismatic mega-fauna .

The above may not be what the West wishes for Africa – I mean what are a few elephant compared to control over access to Africa’s oil and strategic metals; as cheaply as possible. Chaos often facilitates the extraction and under-priced sale of natural resources as we see in the Eastern DRC and even with the black marketing of ivory and rhino horn – where the middlemen & end users, not the people living among the resources, make the majority of the profits. When you are in a survival mode – most people will take any risk necessary to meet their daily needs. That’s why a large middle class tends to increase the likelihood of both political stability and a population willing to buy into modern concepts of biodiversity and conservation.

In simple terms, suppose tomorrow the average American/European found the supermarkets closed and/or we went back into another Great Depression that put people in a survival mode. Within a short time – I’d say a week or maybe two – why poaching, stealing, robberies, etc. would spike as people would do whatever it takes to survive! The majority of Africans are in a Survival Mode! I know I am repeating to some degree what I have said before, but while Daniel’s analysis is critical, it is but one small piece to a larger puzzle that must be constructed if Africa and its people are to have a future.

Conservation, marketing of elephant and rhino products, etc. will fail unless part of a bigger picture.
Say – why can’t Africa develop a major ivory carving business as a means of obtaining added value? Senegal had some good ivory carvers and if the African art I collected over the years is any indication of Africa’s potential – this should be looked at very closely!

Anyway, there will be no Free Lunches. Unless Africa/Africans takes/take control of its/their own destiny – don’t expect the West or China to see you through your current crisis.

About Andre DeGeorges:
Dr. Andre DeGeorges has over 30 years of experience in natural resource management, planning and policy reform in Africa, the Caribbean, Central America and the United States. Dr. DeGeorges retired from the Department of Nature Conservation, Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), Pretoria, South Africa, in 2008, where from 2002 onward he was manager of Project Noah, a program to train youth from regions of Africa rich in wildlife in natural resource management while exposing them to the economic value of wildlife. He is currently an active commentator on conservation.

By: Godfrey Harris

Because of British currency restrictions enacted just before World War II, my father had to come up with an innovative way of getting his cash out of England when, fearing a German invasion, we immigrated to the United States. He settled on silver. Before leaving, he purchased all the Georgian silver objects he could find, with the idea of selling them once the family reached America.

A few months after we arrived, he opened the Harris English Silver Co. in Manhattan. While wartime rationing made many everyday items difficult to obtain, the demands of holidays, birthdays and anniversaries still required special gifts. Antique silver answered that need for many New Yorkers.
By 1944 my father had made more than enough to move the family to California, where he sold most of the remainder of his original inventory. Things were going so well that he decided to take a buying trip to England in 1948, and he took me along as his 11-year-old assistant. At each antique shop we visited, he would slowly survey the goods on display, identify the pieces of particular interest, and then have all the items brought together in one spot where he could inspect them. I was told to pick out anything that caught my eye and bring those pieces, too, to the central collection point.

I soon found that the pieces I gravitated to — boxes, doll house furnishings, knife rests, small carvings, writing implements, hand tools and the like — tended to have one thing in common: They were nearly all made of ivory.

When the shipment from that buying trip reached Los Angeles, my father gave me most of the items I had selected, and that was the start of my ivory collection. After becoming a U.S. diplomat, I added to these original items during trips abroad. And I soon became fascinated by the different uses to which ivory has been put — some practical, because of the material’s special properties, and some decorative, because of its unusual beauty.

Ivory pieces, like other artistic expressions, reflect the time and cultures that produced them. That’s one of the main reasons people collect artifacts of any sort: to preserve the best examples of cultural expression.
Today, however, ivory collections like mine — and ivory collectors themselves — are being vilified. The current debate in Washington over ivory policy has far less to do with protecting elephants than it does with satisfying the assumptions of animal rights groups, making things simple for government officials and accommodating the special wants of hunters and the special needs of musicians and museum curators. Collectors have little voice in the debate, and their collections have been likened to blood diamonds or denigrated as vanity indulgences. Any harm that American collectors suffer from the new regulations has been dismissed by Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as collateral damage for the greater good of saving elephants.

Ashe has issued an order that virtually eliminates all trade and movement in the United States of objects made from or with ivory — no matter their origin, age or provenance — by requiring unimpeachable, detailed documentation on the ivory contained in a piece. To buy, trade or sell such pieces, collectors must have original bills of sale or repair invoices or proof of the year of importation into the United States. No collector and very few antique dealers can produce that kind of documentation, especially since none of it was required at the time most of the pieces were imported or purchased. How many treasures inherited from a relative or given as gifts come with written proof of where they came from or how they got here?

These draconian new rules have not been promulgated casually. Ashe believes that virtually ending all trade in African ivory in the United States — thus sending a message that ivory is valueless — is the best way to protect African elephants from the ravishes of poachers.

But that’s unrealistic and unproven. Today’s poaching problem has its roots in East Asia, where there is still a strong demand for and an active trade in new ivory objects. Demonizing older ivory objects to discourage possession of newer versions of similar items will not bring back the mammoths or save modern elephants from the economic forces that drive poachers.
Indeed, the International Ivory Society, on whose advisory board I sit, believes that taking valuable ivory objects out of circulation will only increase the market price for raw ivory abroad and put elephants in even more danger than at the present.

Everyone is rightly concerned with the plight of African elephants and the horrors that poachers are inflicting on herds across the continent. All of us want to find the right solution to stabilize elephant populations in Africa through sound economic and conservation policies. But the answer must not come at the expense of collectors who play such an important role in preserving important, interesting and revelatory objects in our cultural history.

About Godfrey Harris:
Godfrey Harris heads a public policy consulting firm in Los Angeles and is principal representative of the Political Action Network of the International Ivory Society. The above article ran in Jul. 22, 2014 issue of LA Times.

How will a government ban on selling or trading antique ivory help save endangered elephants?

By: John Leydon

On June 26 countless antiques, musical instruments and other objects made from ivory or decorated with it will be effectively banned by the federal government from sale or trade within the U.S. Coupled with tough new international import-export restrictions, the value of these objects, once in the hundreds of millions of dollars, will evaporate.

The expressed aim of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is to discourage the ivory trade and protect endangered African elephants, though it is difficult to discern how that effort is aided by attacking, say, collectors of Victorian or Art Deco treasures.

To avoid having the ban termed a “blanket prohibition,” which would require congressional legislation, the Fish and Wildlife Service has granted a “regulatory exception” that covers a minuscule number of ivory-laden objects that can meet its elaborate requirements. In addition to proving that a particular object is at least 100 years old, its owner must possess official paperwork showing that it was imported to America before 1990, or legally thereafter, and provide unspecified evidence that the object has not been repaired or modified since December 1973. In other words, the bar has been set so high by the Fish and Wildlife Service that very few items will qualify, and then only at great expense and months of research and bureaucratic wrangling.

The message is clear to those who possess ivory-detailed objects including clarinets, canes, pistols, crucifixes, timepieces, chess sets, cameos, guitars, mahjong sets, pianos or furniture: You own it, you’re stuck with it. The objects shortly will be worthless and uninsurable by government decree, and the IRS is unlikely to allow you to write it off as an investment loss, no matter how much you or your family paid for it—a few hundred dollars at an estate sale or $20,000 at Christie’s.

The impracticality of monitoring every flea market, auction and estate sale in the country will force the Fish and Wildlife Service to selectively enforce the new regulations. Worse, many buyers and sellers—from hobbyists to professionals—may be unaware that they will be vulnerable to confiscation, fines and arrest for violating the new regulations.

When the Fish and Wildlife Service does step in to prosecute owners and confiscate the ivory goods, it will be doing so in the misguided belief that it is helping to save endangered elephants in Africa by demonizing all ivory, no matter the vintage. As someone who collects ivory-detailed walking canes and who counts himself as a dedicated environmentalist, I think the government is overreaching by creating this new criminal class.

If you see the increasingly common signs saying “Support the Ban,” remember that the new federal rule is not directed against the brutal mercenaries and terrorist organizations whose present-day poaching is endangering the last remaining members of a magnificent African species. The domestic ban is aimed indiscriminately at you or your family or your neighbors, and at heirlooms, collections and investments.

Conservation organizations and lovers of cultural treasures must work together to stop the tragedy unfolding in Africa by supporting forceful interdiction efforts. A first step toward encouraging such a sensible alliance might be for Congress to impose a time-out on the Fish and Wildlife Service, delaying the implementation of its misguided ban and giving thoughtful people who understand its impact, and its folly, more time to weigh in.

The House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs is scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss the domestic ivory ban. Let’s hope our elected representatives can bring some sense to the discussion and reverse this new and faulty regulation.

About John Leydon:
Mr. Leydon, a retired telecom executive, is a member of the International Society of Cane Collectors and a staunch supporter of international wildlife conservation organizations.