Elephant populations in these three countries have never been threatened.
Each country has had to meet strict anti-poaching and monitoring criteria, and
all the ivory sold came from stockpiles built up by natural deaths and by culls
of problem animals. In fact, since the end of culling—which had been
financed by ivory sales—the most pressing elephant problem in Namibia,
Zimbabwe and Botswana has been overpopulation. Zimbabwe alone has between 60 000
and 70 000 elephants, about double the country’s carrying capacity.

Still, not to be deterred, some environmental groups are up in arms over the
sale. One animal rights group has even declared that “the end result will be
indiscriminate slaughter . . . with elephant carcasses strewn across the African
savanna”. Nothing could be further from the truth. These ivory sales may
accomplish more for elephant conservation in southern Africa in one year than
the trade ban has in almost ten.

For a start, all the returns are to be ploughed back not only into elephant
conservation, but also into local community development. This is especially
important because elephants are threatened not so much by poaching or hunting,
but by habitat loss. Trade bans do nothing to address this, although without
habitat protection, protecting elephants is meaningless.

CITES hopes to reduce the value of threatened and endangered species in the
marketplace. While this may reduce poaching, it also discourages local
stewardship. To the locals, elephants are five-tonne menaces that destroy
fragile habitats, trample crops and wreak havoc on water supplies. In other
words, unless they can be given some positive worth, elephants are just a
nuisance to the people living around them.

But if rural communities receive the revenues from ivory sales, elephants
become demonstrably valuable. It is this value that determines whether they will
be conserved, or even tolerated.

In many parts of rural southern Africa, the average yearly income ranges from
$100 to $300. The prices reached at the recent ivory sales have
not been officially released, but in Zimbabwe at least, the average price
appears to have been around $100 a kilogram, with some ivory fetching
double this. These figures underscore the importance of giving rural communities
a stake in wildlife conservation. If wildlife does not pay its way, it will
simply be replaced by something else that does.

A fundamental flaw in the CITES approach to conservation is that it
completely ignores the importance of those who own the rights to the resources.
When these rights are well defined, endangered species will be better protected.
South African bontebok and American bison, for example, were both effectively
wiped out on public lands, but safeguarded on private ones. In such cases a
trade ban undermines conservation, and CITES simply cannot reconcile this.

The best-known attempt to promote the rights of a community to natural
resources is Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme—the Communal Areas Management
Programme for Indigenous Resources (www.campfire-zimbabwe.org/index.html).
Set up in 1989, it has improved resource management by giving local people a
stake in conserving wildlife and maintaining habitat. CAMPFIRE has had its share
of problems, mainly due to corruption and political interference. But it
remains, according to Jon Hutton of the Africa Resources Trust, “an honest
attempt to do the right thing in places where rural people don’t have many other
´Ç±čłŮľ±´Ç˛Ô˛ő”.

Political wrangling at the international level only makes things worse; CITES
suffers from this malaise. For example, West African countries withheld their
votes in favour of the ivory sale, not because of reservations about
conservation issues but in the hope of securing additional foreign aid.

Despite such shortcomings, last month’s historic ivory sales are a step in
the right direction. They are an important recognition that creating rather than
destroying value offers the best hope for lasting conservation success. CITES
itself, however, remains fundamentally flawed. It would be far more effective to
promote arrangements for conservation through commerce and positive incentives
to protect valuable wildlife, than to introduce marketplace restrictions that
undermine these efforts.

CORAL reefs are enticingly beautiful, and terrifyingly fragile. In the
Pacific, the El Niño of 1982-83 wiped out over 90 per cent of the corals
of the Galápagos Islands. Yet the vagaries of nature can pale against the
influence of people on coral reefs, who can either protect them or destroy
hundreds of years of growth in minutes.

To draw attention to these dangers, the UN has designated this year as the
International Year of the Reef. Attention has already focused on the
Philippines, where by some estimates 90 per cent of the reefs are already dead
or deteriorating. Dynamite and cyanide fishing are common in the area. Cyanide
stuns the large fish most prized by the live fish trade, making them easier
prey, but it kills the coral.

Much of the blame for this destruction seems to be heaped on the wealthy
diners of Hong Kong. This is not, however, where the real problem lies. The
greatest threat to coral reefs is not market demand but the harvesting
free-for-all. If the Year of the Reef is to have any lasting, positive impact,
it must go beyond fat-cat scapegoats and focus on restoring and strengthening
reef tenure systems such as the traditional, communal institutions that can
prove so successful at conserving coral reefs.

Throughout Oceania, communities manage local reefs and lagoons, and the
fishing within them. Control typically resides with a clan, chief or family, and
extends from the beach to the outer edges of the reefs, sometimes as far as the
visible horizon.

Reef tenure provides the motivation for conservation. With outsiders
excluded, the coral reefs become valuable assets that the community can both
protect and benefit from. They are, in essence, natural fish farms. But in
places such as the Philippines, effective controls are rare, so rapacious
harvesters are able to move in, deplete and destroy the reef, and then move
on.

Bob Johannes, an Australian who has studied both the live fish trade and reef
conservation in the South Pacific, found that village control over local marine
resources was the only effective deterrent to destructive fishing practices.
Historically, islanders clearly understood that exclusive control creates
incentives for conservation. The traditional punishment in Oceania for poaching
was death. Retribution is less severe now, but reefs are still vigilantly
protected where tenure is secure.

Community control may be traditional, but it is also highly sophisticated.
Communally managed fisheries often recognise closed seasons and closed areas,
and some abide by size limits and even quotas to protect fish stocks. They are
both resilient and flexible. In the Solomon Islands, for example, the prospect
of giant clam aquaculture led to new tenure arrangements. Reef-holding clan
leaders partitioned reefs and allocated portions to individual families to
accommodate this new form of harvesting. In the island of Yap, near Guam,
traditional fishing rights extend 12 miles out to sea, and 75 villages there are
involved in growing giant clams for export.

In Fiji, some communities employ fish wardens to patrol their reefs. One
village divided its customary fishing grounds into sections, and prohibited
fishing in a portion of them at all times. Even marine reserves, which are
controversial when imposed by governments, have been set up voluntarily. In all
of these cases, the difference between peaceful and effective conservation
efforts in Oceania and contentious and often counterproductive measures
elsewhere has been secure tenure.

So what should all this mean for the International Year of the Reef? Johannes
believes that there is not an island in Oceania where marine resources are
conserved more effectively today than they were before Europeans came onto the
scene. Unfortunately, examples abound where traditional conservation practices
were weakened or forcibly abolished, and resources subsequently dwindled. In the
Philippines, village control was common until the Spanish conquest, when marine
resources became the property of the Spanish crown.

As attention turns to developing coastal communities and the state of the
world’s coral reefs, the debilitating effects of Western influence in the past
should not be forgotten. The live fish trade and its devastating effects on some
reefs has spurred calls for a ban on trading in some species, and for certain
methods of fishing to be outlawed. But this is not the answer. Millions of
dollars could be spent trying to ban cyanide or trade in specific fish species
to little or no avail.

Local control of resources could save these reefs from destruction. Where
population densities are high, poverty widespread and corruption rampant, these
types of community arrangements are more difficult to institute, but all the
more essential.

The danger to the reefs is real. As those in the Philippines decline, cyanide
fishing is spreading fast through Indonesia. For the solution, these nations
need only look eastwards to the reef tenure and conservation institutions of the
South Pacific.

The Makah, an isolated tribe living at the northwestern tip of the
continental US on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, last hunted a grey whale
in 1926. Tribal leaders believe, however, that a return to the hunt will revive
their culture and their people. The Makah have lived in roughly the same place
for more than 2000 years. For much of that time their lives revolved around the
whales. Phillip Drucker, an American anthropologist who studied the Makah in the
1950s, estimated that at one time, up to 80 per cent of the Makah diet was whale
meat. In the 1970s, archaeologists excavating the village of Ozette, the
“American Pompeii” which was buried under a mud slide in the 15th century, found
that whalebone had been used for just about everything in the village.

The importance of whales to the Makah was also evident in their 1855 treaty
with the US government. Ceding their land holdings gave them few problems, as
long as they maintained their interests offshore. In the treaty they secured
“the right of taking fish and of whaling or sealing at usual and accustomed
grounds.” The Makah claim that this right empowers them to proceed with the
whale hunt. However, out of deference to international convention, they have
asked the US to request that they be allotted five whales for subsistence and
ceremonial purposes by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which meets
this week in Aberdeen. The US has long been an outspoken opponent of commercial
whaling, but it has also supported indigenous Alaskans who hunt endangered
bowhead whales. So the US is supporting the Makah’s request, which will clearly
not affect a grey whale population that is now estimated to stand at 23
000—possibly more than were around before the species was hunted
commercially.

The Makah are asking to whale for subsistence purposes only. However, their
treaty stipulates that they have the right to trade what they harvest.
Throughout their history, the Makah have traded far and wide, and they do not
rule out commercial whaling in the future. This could lose them the support of
green groups , and the US government would find itself in a bind. Any trade
initiated by the Makah would blur the line between subsistence and commerce, and
would force the IWC to reconsider its staunch opposition to requests from
coastal whaling communities in Japan and Norway to take minke whales—a
species now off the danger list. Politics and morality have long dominated
“scientific” decision making at the IWC, and any trade in whale products is
likely to inflame political rhetoric.

Contrary to the stereotype of native peoples as communalists, the
Makah’s strong environmental ethic and strict conservation practices stem from a
centuries-old legacy of ownership and stewardship. Drucker pointed out that long
before contact with settlers, the Makah “carried the concept of ownership to an
extreme. Not only rivers and fishing places close at hand, but the waters of the
sea miles offshore . . . all were privately owned property.” Anthropologist Ann
Renker, who has studied the Makah extensively, noted in 1989 that marine areas
have always been regarded as “property in every sense of the word, requiring
rights of ownership, access and use”.

What I found when I toured the reservation with Dan Greene, the Makah’s head
of fisheries, bears this out. Everything from salmon fishing on rivers and
streams to shellfish beds to fish banks more than 60 miles offshore were owned
at one time by Makah families or fishermen. While Makah institutions of property
encouraged conservation, the fishery regulations that replaced them encouraged
depletion. Today, managers are just beginning to realise what the Makah knew
centuries ago—that ownership creates incentives for conservation. Whether
managed for food or merely to ensure their protection, whale populations would
be safer if they were insulated from the political whims of the IWC.

In a letter to the editor of a Seattle newspaper last autumn, Paul Watson,
founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, refuted the right of the Makah
to whale because the US “does not own the whales and neither do the Makahs”. As
unhappiness with the IWC grows on both sides of the debate, perhaps the
ownership system that served the Makah so well for so long should be
reconsidered.