How Fringe Activists Started The Ivory Ban
This article examines the tactics of a small group of animal rights activists and conservationists that led to a ban on ivory trade under the October 1989 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
In October 1989 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, voted to classify the African elephant as an endangered species and to make trade in ivory illegal. That policy decision displeased many conservation experts in Africa and elsewhere, who argued that a ban on the ivory trade would prove disastrous for the African elephant. Opponents of the ban favored a free-market approach that would offer rural Africans tangible benefits as an incentive to preserve their elephant herds and would help to compensate for the costs of coexisting with elephants.
The free-market approach presupposes consumptive utilization of elephants, which in turn requires that Africans have access to a market for ivory. The 1989 CITES treaty abolished the legal ivory market, overriding the protests of the scientists and economists who advocated consumptive utilization. The blanket ban on ivory trading prevailed until June 1997, when it was partially lifted, at the request of southern African countries, to allow limited sales of existing ivory stockpiles. Widespread ivory trading remains illegal, however, under the international regime established by the CITES treaty.
This article shows how lobbying and publicity efforts by a small group of animal-rights activists and preservationists, whose views did not coincide with those of mainstream conservationists, ultimately succeeded in generating broad-based public support for an ivory-trade ban.
This analysis provides a case study of the spread of a political position, publicly articulated, from one interest group to another and even from one country to another. Starting from a very small base of support, a policy with little scientific respectability can easily snowball into a national and international program with unstoppable momentum, and thus tiny special-interest groups can wield an enormously disproportionate degree of influence in the political process.
[Abstract excerpted from article]