Economic use need
not be a death knell
By Vin Suprynowicz
web
posted July 1997
Worried that the pig, the Angus steer and the dairy cow are ever likely
to face extinction?
Such concerns sound goofy precisely because humans find it of economic
benefit to maintain healthy, self-sustaining populations of these creatures.
But other species, equally or more valuable, have been driven to the brink
of extinction by economic exploitation before other sources were found
for the products they provided -- the whales that used to fill the world's
lamps with oil, for example, and the large, plumed birds hunted for their
feathers in the days when a proper lady wouldn't be seen in public without
half a bird on her head.
Why the different fates of these two types of "exploitable species"?
Private ownership.
Given the price of beef these days, one might expect freelance hunters
to roam rural America, shooting all the cattle they can find, and loading
them quickly into refrigerator trucks for a quick haul to the closest
urban market.
Indeed, some such activity still occurs. But the reason it's limited is
precisely because it's against the law -- and not just the kind of law
that might be enforced by one lonely government ranger assigned to patrol
hundreds of thousands of remote acres, hoping to catch someone stepping
on an endangered bug.
Nope, cattle rustling is, to this day, the kind of crime that's likely
to draw the urgent attention of every nearby private stock owner, who
the perpetrator fully realizes are not likely to stop with a polite request
to "leave that at the ranger station on your way out."
On the other hand, nobody ever came up with a system to establish private
property rights in whales. And it is that very lack of private title that
has long crippled efforts to protect the remaining populations of some
of wild species.
Modern Africa provides an object lesson. As detailed by Ike Sugg and Urs
Kreuter in their book, "Elephants and Ivory: Lessons from the Trade
Ban," published by London's Institute of Economic Affairs and available
from Laissez Faire Books in San Francisco, the largely socialist regime
in Kenya has long held that private ownership of any of that nation's
wild herds would be anathema. The result -- despite a huge force of government
game wardens armed with fully-automatic weapons -- is that poaching has
continued to decimate Kenya's herds.
On the other hand -- while some government controls remain, many imposed
from outside by American and European meddlers -- nations further south,
like Tanzania and Zimbabwe, have opted to grant the very farmers who might
otherwise kill marauding elephants, an economic incentive to preserve
those herds for their tourist value, by granting them some form of private
title to the beasts.
As a result, southern Africa's elephant herds are thriving.
But the largest potential economic incentive to preserve elephant herds
at self-renewing levels -- the ability to sell their ivory -- has been
blocked for seven years by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species.
That's why -- as limited as the exemption is -- Western newspaper readers
were presumably puzzled June 20 by the photographic spectacle of members
of Zimbabwe's Department of National Parks and Wildlife raising their
arms and cheering at news that a U.N. wildlife panel will finally allow
Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to make a one-time sale of 59 tons of stockpiled
elephant tusks to Japan next year.
"This is a triumph for sanity, objectivity and for recognizing developing
countries' ability to take their own decisions on natural resource management,"
cheered Dick Pitman of the Zambezi Society of Zimbabwe.
The general response in this country seems to have been that it's too
bad the elephants have to be sacrificed in the necessary process of allowing
more African self-determination.
But this decision need not be bad news for the herds or those who admire
them -- providing the governments in question are encouraged to continue
embracing the "private property" model.
Word is, some of the $30 million expected to be realized from the sale
will be used for elephant fences, and to compensate farmers who lose crops
to the huge herbivores.
A good start. But why not go all the way, get the process out of the political
arena entirely, and grant the local folk title to the herds -- along with
the right to sell the ivory themselves, once they've demonstrated sufficient
husbandry skills to maintain populations at self-sustaining levels?
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las
Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com.
The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/.
The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain
Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
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