Call of the wild: Trade bans and conservation

The Economist: Call of the wild: Trade bans and conservation

Is the prohibition of trade saving wildlife, or endangering it?

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The point is not that bans never work. They can, especially in the short term or when species are in dire danger. But their longer-term success depends on three factors. First, they must be coupled with a reduction in demand for the banned products. If a ban helps to shift people's tastes, so much the better. Second, they must not undermine incentives to conserve endangered species in the wild. Third, they have to be supported by governments and citizens in the countries where these species live. If these conditions are not met, bans are unlikely either to reduce trade or to maintain endangered species. They may even make matters worse.

This is an excellent article about the complex interplay between regulation and markets. The article concludes with:

Although CITES arose at a time when command-and-control environmental legislation was popular, parts of the organisation do want to change. Juan Carlos Vasquez, its legal and trade-policy officer, says that policy interventions that do not take into account the underlying causes of wildlife loss have a high risk of failure. “Bans are popular and easy to adopt by enacting legislation, but they do not work everywhere.” Mr Broad says that if trade in a species is banned as a last resort, it is a “failure of the system”: governments should have intervened earlier using CITES regulatory measures or other incentives.

More successes, such as the temporary ban on trading vicuña products (and its lifting), are needed. Signs of CITES's evolution are evident in its decision to allow some species to be traded under permit, for example in one-off ivory sales.

Such changes will be fought tooth and nail. Trade makes conservationists nervous and animal-welfare charities suspicious. Barbara Maas, who heads Care for the Wild, dismisses the idea that wildlife trade can be used to support conservation as a “fundamentally anthropocentric world view”. In Kenya attempts to amend legislation to allow for the wider consumptive use of wildlife were subject to heavy lobbying by international animal-welfare charities. (One lobby group is said to have threatened to undermine Kenya's tourist trade.)

Similarly, attempts to allocate money to CITES for economic studies of wildlife use and conservation have faced “strong resistance”, say people close to the organisation, partly due to pressure from international lobbies. The biggest problem with economic studies, says Mr MacGregor, is that “questions will be asked about the use of funding for a lot of conservation work that is founded on faith.” CITES could become a much more powerful tool for conservation. The question is whether it will be allowed to do so.

And this just highlights once again my deep suspicion about the motives of so many environmentalists, Christian or otherwise, who either willfully or naively embrace command-and-control, top-down, authoritarian solutions to problems. Markets, or markets combined with a specific regulation, are often far more effective tools, yet they are categorically dismissed out of hand. Accusations of anthropocentrism and neoclassical-theocapitalism are not infrequent responses to those who propose such solutions.