ABSTRACT
Are elephants worth more dead than alive? This is not a trivial question. It is in fact the key economic problem that any inquiry into elephants and the ivory trade has to address. We know that the ivory harvested from elephants has a high commercial value, which is increasing as the population becomes scarce. But is this increasing scarcity and commercial value a crucial determinant of the elephants’ decline in Africa, or might it also be part of the solution to conserving elephant populations? Elephants also have other values than their ivory. Elephants are one of Africa’s “big five” species of large mammals that are major tourist attractions. Elephants also have an important ecological role in opening up areas for livestock and in ensuring ecological balance. On the other hand, elephants are also known to cause extensive crop and other economic damage where there are land-use conflicts between the species and human populations. Do these additional non-ivory values of elephants provide sufficient incentives for preserving the African elephant, and can we manage elephant populations so as to maximize their total economic value, including ivory values where appropriate? How does regulation of the ivory trade contribute to this sustainable management of elephant populations, and can we design an effective international regulatory mechanism towards this end?
