If you’ve ever seen a herd of elephants moving majestically across an African savannah, you’ll always remember the experience. Equally memorable yet horrifying is the sight of a dead animal killed by a poacher for its tusks.
The multibillion-dollar trade in illegal wildlife “products,” including elephant ivory, threatens the survival of numerous species. It also undermines human well-being and prosperity worldwide. Wildlife crime weakens social capital in communities close to animal populations, corrupts local officials and national governments, enflames long-time conflicts, short-circuits sustainable paths to economic development, and fuels transnational crime organizations also engaged in narcotics, human trafficking, terrorism, and other illicit activities.
While the population trends for elephants and other heavily trafficked species remain dire, emerging success stories in some of the planet’s most ecologically sensitive places offer encouraging lessons for how the world can defeat wildlife crime. Progress demands a two-pronged approach: bottom-up efforts to engage and empower local communities plus top-down diplomatic, financial, and technology-enabled strategies to influence conservation policies and reinforce law enforcement authorities at the national level.
The worldwide challenge
Animal populations suffered calamitous declines during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Scientists estimate that Africa’s elephant population fell from 10 million in 1930 to less than 2 million by the 1960s as a result of habitat shrinkage and human-animal conflicts.
In 1973, America led the world in developing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, also known as the Washington Convention. This landmark agreement established the concept of wildlife crime in international law and banned trade in certain “products,” notably from rhinoceroses and tigers.
Subsequent agreements strengthened protections for elephants and other species. Today, the Washington Convention has 183 signatory nations, including virtually every key host country in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, anti-trafficking efforts depend on national and local enforcement, which until recently has proven weak in too many places.
Increasing restrictions coupled with changing attitudes curtailed demand for a time, slowing population losses in the 1990s and 2000s. But increasing prosperity in Asia brought an explosive resurgence in demand since 2009, particularly in China and Southeast Asia.
Ivory sells for some $1,000 per pound in East Asia today, amounting to more than $50,000 for the tusks of a single animal. Another driver of demand is the $130 billion traditional Chinese medicine industry.
Poachers now kill approximately 20,000 African elephants per year, four times the rate in the late 1990s. Africa’s elephant population, estimated at almost 600,000 early in the early 2000s, is now below 400,000. In Tanzania, elephant numbers have fallen by 60 percent since 2009, and by more than 80 percent in certain areas such as the Selous Game Reserve. Even Asian elephants, mostly lacking tusks, have declined by more than half since 2000 because of exploding consumer interest in elephant skin for handbags and shoes.
Asian demand has had similar consequences for other prized animals. Increasingly prosperous consumers want rhino horn for medicinal uses, even though it consists of the same material as human fingernails. A rhino horn can sell for as much as $240,000 in China. As a result, poaching in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from a few dozen animals to more than 1,300 per year, and Africa’s rhino population has dwindled to about 20,000.
The case for caring
The case for fighting wildlife crime begins with moral responsibility. If recent trends continue, the African elephant could face extinction in the wild within our lifetime. Future generations may face a world without rhinos, lions, or pangolins. As conservation leader Paul Oxton warns, “Only when the last of the animal horns, tusks, skin and bones have been sold will mankind realize that money can never buy back our wildlife.”
As global citizens, we have a responsibility to ensure not only the well-being of our own species but also the welfare of our planet.
Wildlife crime erodes societies’ political and social health. In many African countries, trafficking undermines governance, culture, and the rule of law, reinforcing cycles of violence and instability. Terrorist groups play major roles in wildlife crime. Poachers affiliated with Boko Haram are thought to have slaughtered 25,000 elephants in one region of Gabon over the last decade, exploiting children to transport the illicit ivory.
In Asia, crime syndicates force girls into sexual slavery, hold young men captive aboard illegal fishing boats, and traffic simultaneously in narcotics and animal parts. Experts believe North Korean officials engage in wildlife trafficking to bolster their wealth and provide much-needed financial support for the North Korean regime.
Wildlife crime also undermines more sustainable avenues to economic development in local communities, including the eco-tourism industry.One 2016 study estimated that declining elephant densities cost African countries $25 million per year in foregone tourism revenue.
Communities near protected areas with eco-tourism activities enjoy 17 percent higher household wealth levels and 16 percent lower poverty rates than otherwise similar communities. Individual poachers, meanwhile, keep only $20 to $50 per animal – or 0.01 to 0.05 percent of retail value for a rhino – despite risking imprisonment or death.
A more profound economic problem is that armies of young men learn to be violent criminals instead of productive citizens. Corruption and foregone tax revenues undermine government services essential to economic development. And the trade is inherently unsustainable, as extinction of key species ends the “industry” for local gangs.
Sustainable solutions
Recent evidence proves that two-pronged strategies combining bottom-up and top-down elements can succeed in reducing poaching and reviving animal populations. At the bottom-up level, empowering frontline communities represents one of the best opportunities for long-term gains. As former Secretary of State James Baker underscored in 2018, “If we are to protect the world’s remaining elephants, we must commit ourselves to supporting the countries where they live, and whose communities are threatened by criminal trafficking networks.”
Namibia, for example, has built on the country’s innovative Communal Conservancy system to allow communities to create and operate local conservancies in which citizens protect and benefit from regional wildlife. Namibia’s 82 communal conservancies span 62,000 square miles and one-fifth of the population, and they generate more than $7 million per year in monetary and in-kind benefits.
Communities reinvest these revenues in education, health, and economic development initiatives, as well as anti-poaching and wildlife management programs. Because of this effort, Namibia’s elephant population has tripled, and highly-endangered desert lion and black rhino populations have rebounded as well.
The case for caring
The case for fighting wildlife crime begins with moral responsibility. If recent trends continue, the African elephant could face extinction in the wild within our lifetime. Future generations may face a world without rhinos, lions, or pangolins. As conservation leader Paul Oxton warns, “Only when the last of the animal horns, tusks, skin and bones have been sold will mankind realize that money can never buy back our wildlife.”
As global citizens, we have a responsibility to ensure not only the well-being of our own species but also the welfare of our planet.
Wildlife crime erodes societies’ political and social health. In many African countries, trafficking undermines governance, culture, and the rule of law, reinforcing cycles of violence and instability. Terrorist groups play major roles in wildlife crime. Poachers affiliated with Boko Haram are thought to have slaughtered 25,000 elephants in one region of Gabon over the last decade, exploiting children to transport the illicit ivory.
In Asia, crime syndicates force girls into sexual slavery, hold young men captive aboard illegal fishing boats, and traffic simultaneously in narcotics and animal parts. Experts believe North Korean officials engage in wildlife trafficking to bolster their wealth and provide much-needed financial support for the North Korean regime.
Wildlife crime also undermines more sustainable avenues to economic development in local communities, including the eco-tourism industry.One 2016 study estimated that declining elephant densities cost African countries $25 million per year in foregone tourism revenue.
Communities near protected areas with eco-tourism activities enjoy 17 percent higher household wealth levels and 16 percent lower poverty rates than otherwise similar communities. Individual poachers, meanwhile, keep only $20 to $50 per animal – or 0.01 to 0.05 percent of retail value for a rhino – despite risking imprisonment or death.
A more profound economic problem is that armies of young men learn to be violent criminals instead of productive citizens. Corruption and foregone tax revenues undermine government services essential to economic development. And the trade is inherently unsustainable, as extinction of key species ends the “industry” for local gangs.
Sustainable solutions
Recent evidence proves that two-pronged strategies combining bottom-up and top-down elements can succeed in reducing poaching and reviving animal populations. At the bottom-up level, empowering frontline communities represents one of the best opportunities for long-term gains. As former Secretary of State James Baker underscored in 2018, “If we are to protect the world’s remaining elephants, we must commit ourselves to supporting the countries where they live, and whose communities are threatened by criminal trafficking networks.”
Namibia, for example, has built on the country’s innovative Communal Conservancy system to allow communities to create and operate local conservancies in which citizens protect and benefit from regional wildlife. Namibia’s 82 communal conservancies span 62,000 square miles and one-fifth of the population, and they generate more than $7 million per year in monetary and in-kind benefits.
Communities reinvest these revenues in education, health, and economic development initiatives, as well as anti-poaching and wildlife management programs. Because of this effort, Namibia’s elephant population has tripled, and highly-endangered desert lion and black rhino populations have rebounded as well.
This piece originally appeared in The Catalyst, a Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute.
Cullum Clark is Director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative and Adjunct Professor of Economics at SMU in Dallas. As Director, he leads the Bush Institute’s work on domestic economic policy, including programs focused on Opportunity and Ownership and on Fiscal Reform. Cullum worked for 25 years in the investment industry, at two Wall Street firms and then as founder and president of a Dallas family office. He has served on the board or investment committee of numerous non-profits and early-stage businesses. He earned his PhD in Economics at SMU in 2017. His research and policy interests include fiscal policy, monetary policy, economic geography and urban economics, and economic growth. He also earned his undergraduate degree at Yale and a Master’s degree at Harvard. Cullum and his wife Nita live in Dallas and have three daughters.
Natalie Gonnella-Platts serves as the Director of the Women's Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute. In this role, Natalie is responsible for research and programmatic efforts that empower women worldwide to lead in their communities and countries. This includes the work of the First Ladies Initiative, which aims to enable and support First Ladies from around the world in effectively using their platforms to empower women and children in their countries. Additionally, she is the host of the Bush Institute’s award nominated podcast, Ladies, First; the co-author of a first-of-its kind analysis on global first ladies, A Role Without a Rulebook; and served as a project lead on the development of the Bush Institute’s 2018 special exhibit, First Ladies: Style of Influence.
Photo: A herd of elephants on the Maaisa Mara Game Reserve. (Shutterstock.com)
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