You can’t figure it out

The history of rhino poaching is littered with the corpses of economists who have figured it all out on the back of an envelope (How farming rhino will save them (Letters, August 3).

Published:2011/08/11 07:30:18 AM

The history of rhino poaching is littered with the corpses of economists who have figured it all out on the back of an envelope (How farming rhino will save them (Letters, August 3). What will it take to make them understand that market forces are not controlled by logic and that the actions of individual players can’t be anticipated just by looking at a column of figures?

The naivety of the author Michael Eustace is staggering, and it’s summed up in this claim: "Importantly, there would be no need for the killing of even one rhino, given a legal trade."

The world is trying to get to grips with the devastating effects of the Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species’ 2008 decision to give the go-ahead for China to share 108 tons of auctioned southern African ivory with Japan. A minimum of 55 tons of illegal ivory have been seized around the world since this decision was made and tens of thousands of elephants poached. In 2009, the Chinese made more than 700 seizures of illegal ivory, the most in a single year by any country. And customs people will tell you how small a percentage of illegal wildlife shipments is actually intercepted.

Why is this happening, when the Chinese ivory market has been "flooded"? And why would a legal trade in rhino horn fail to stop the poaching? Well, if you can’t live without a few figures, here they are: it is projected that the (mainland only) Chinese middle class will hit 600-million in 2015. If only one-third of those people take just one single dose (15g) of rhino horn a year, and assuming a mean white-rhino horn weight of 4kg, we will need 750000 rhino horns a year to satisfy the market. That’s 16 times the estimated global rhino population.

The illegal trade in "medicinal" wildlife products is mostly driven by consumer perceptions that don’t obey the rules of economics, which the current global crisis shows to be a very inexact science anyway. For example, why are wild tigers and bears being poached at an alarming rate, when thousands of them are being held captive and "harvested" for their body parts in east Asia?

Conservationists know why. Economists apparently don’t.

Susie Watts and Mark Jones

Humane Society International