Market solutions.

Time check: We are roughly five years into the era of marketplace-as-solution-to-all-our-social-ills. Sometime around the turn of the decade, everyone agreed to equate democracy with having many choices at the checkout counter, and the "market solution" became a form of magic incantation, capable of transmuting pollution into gold and wastelands into wetlands.

Nowhere does this phenomenon arise more starkly than with the international trade in wildfire, particularly elephants and rhinos in sub-Saharan Africa. Trade in ivory and rhino horn has been banned by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species since the late 70s. The push is on, led by four African nations and supported here by some environmental groups, to reinstitute a limited trade. The reform rests ostensibly on the twin theories that, without the support of local people and without more money for government management programs (derived from the profits from the sale of animal parts), Africa's wildlife population will continue to decline.

That selling off Africa's wildlife will save it is a dubious proposition, but not atypical of the detached analysis that plagues this new school of thought. The notion founders on a pair of powerful illusions. The first is that all Africans, from rural farmers to members of parliament, from Tanzanians to Zimbabweans, share the same philosophies of life. The second is that this little exercise in applied economics can take place in isolation from the economic storms that are buffeting the region.

Animals are fast disappearing in parts of Africa that are economically devastated and, by consequence, profoundly corrupt. In Zimbabwe, according to research by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), bureaucrats in search of hard currency are stockpiling rhino horn and ivory by overestimating elephant populations and arguing for "culls," and by promoting ineffective rhino dehorning operations paid for by western philanthropies. A government document obtained by HSUS investigators lists prices for Zimbabwe's wildlife, from $350 for a leopard to $200 for a male sable and $12 for a bat-eared fox.

The government of Zimbabwe argues that lifting the trade ban will provide income to manage the parks, but of the roughly $83 million that the country earned from park tourism last year, less than two percent went to protecting the animals. Last time Zimbabwe conducted a sale of ivory, netted some $800,000, a pittance compared to what it obtained from non-lethal tourism, and a tiny fraction of the money that would be needed to police the parks effectively.

This is by no means an exercise in Africa-bashing. On the contrary, Africa has in general made a commitment to preserving its natural heritage that puts America's to shame. Aside from the state of Alaska, no region on Earth has set aside a larger portion on Earth has set wildlife protection. And few populations face more fundamental competition with wild creatures than rural Africans.

The failure here is in the attempt on the part of well-meaning environmentalists in the West to force the complex and desperate situation of rural Africa into the straitjacket of a "market" theory that bears little relation to reality.

If the United States wishes to help Africa save its wildfire, it will have to pay considerably more in broad-spectrum, enlightened economic support to the region. Sub-Saharan Africa is paying billions more in debt service than it receives in foreign aid right now, an astounding financial hemorrhage that, more than any other single factor, contributes to the pressure on elephants and rhinos. The support that does come in, in the form of loans for large-scale "development" projects, usually does more harm than good. And the U.S. will have to continue to oppose opening up markets in animal parts, while clamping down the world's leading buyers, Taiwan and China, through the economic sanctions permitted by U.S. wildlife laws -- sanctions which have never been used.

Ultimately, Africa's wildlife must be extricated completely from market considerations if it is to survive. This fact does not lend itself to the glamour of tough-minded "cutting edge" economic theories, but it offers some hope to the animals themselves.