The price of habitat: in southern Africa, increasing conflict between elephants and humans is raising painful questions about cohabitation on a crowded planet.

An excruciating conflict is under way in southern Africa - not a war between rival tribes, but a territorial conflict between two species: Homo sapiens, which is rapidly expanding its claims on the land, and Loxodonta africana, the African elephant, which needs large expanses of land by nature, and which can become dangerous when crowded.

The trouble stems from the fact that both humans and elephants are capable of running roughshod over the earth. People destroy 850,000 hectares of forest - an area half the size of Israel or Kuwait - in southern Africa every year, much of it for agricultural expansion into the elephants' habitat. Elephants, in turn, sometimes trample farm crops and kill people who have moved into close proximity. In the band of wildlife-rich but economically poor countries that stretches across the southern part of the continent from Angola to Mozambique, ecologists are asking how elephants and people - and other competing populations - can successfully exist in the same environment. Many are now convinced that the only way they can manage that is to find ways to use local wildlife - elephants included - as a sustainable economic resource. Just how to do that has become a matter of intense debate and painful decisions.

In this debate, two camps have become vociferous. One has taken a stand for strict preservation of habitat - setting aside and protecting tracts of land and allowing nature to take its course. The other takes the view that human development has already passed the point where such preservation can suffice. It holds that because human activity has already altered many natural ecosystems to the extent that they are no longer capable of self-regulating, we can only protect nature from here on by managing it ourselves - by taking active measures to counter the effects of such no-longer-natural phenomena as the crowding of elephant populations into parks too small to support them.

Strict preservation of habitat is the most simple way, and sometimes the only way, of effectively saving species, especially endemic species - those adapted to life within a particular biological niche. But setting aside enough habitat to preserve a large population of nomadic animals such as elephants, which move over migratory routes covering hundreds of kilometers, and every day consume more than a quarter ton of solid food each, is almost impossible. Most wildlife sanctuaries are simply not large enough to support elephant populations, and farmers or villagers living on the periphery are highly vulnerable to what happens when the giant animals don't stay inside their boundaries. In 1995, for example, villagers living near Zambia's Bangweulu Swamp wildlife preserve nearly starved after elephants from the park began trampling farmers and destroying crops.

On the other hand, the view that it's too late not to use human intervention is based on observations that once-stable elephant populations are being dangerously destabilized - in some places decimated, in others increased to the point that they begin destroying their own habitats.

In the past, the elephants' gargantuan eating habits have played a key role in sub-Saharan ecology, helping both to control their own population and to sustain the diversity of other wildlife. In the savanna, elephants dig water holes, which other species use as well. In wooded areas, they push over trees and shrubs while browsing for food (they subsist largely on saplings, bark, and leaves in the rainy season), but this also helps to regenerate the same vegetation they destroy. Many acacia trees, for example, will not regenerate in the shade of mature trees. When the old acacias are destroyed, new trees get started. Meanwhile, the downed vegetation helps promote fires, which convert woodland to grassland (creating habitat for such grazing animals as zebras), and the elephants migrate away in search of more forage.

This ecological dynamic helped to control population by making elephants work extremely hard to survive - subjecting them to a regimen that not all could survive. For example, there is a 25,000-square-kilometer ecosystem called the Serengeti-Mara, a grassland along the border of Kenya and Tanzania, that prior to the middle of this century had been a woodland. The woodlands reverted to grasslands as they were consumed and overrun by elephants. In past centuries, the elephants would then have moved on. As they ate their way across the landscape, some of them would have found themselves stranded by their own appetites, too far from any newly regenerated forage, and would have died of starvation. But that also meant that they had ranged far enough to let the land they had left behind them regenerate.

In recent decades, however, this cycle has been interrupted. Elephants confined to smaller ranges by the expansion of human development can quickly exceed their range capacity. Their sudden overcrowding is exacerbated by the fact that parks and refuges now offer a constant supply of water - greatly stabilizing the historically uncertain habitat and virtually ensuring uninterrupted reproduction. Because elephants are known to keep breeding as long as their food and water supply is adequate, this can set them up for rapid population increases - which sooner or later reach unsustainable levels.

Under these conditions, hungry herds may be compelled to migrate into areas where they are not wanted or where the woodland has not yet had time to regenerate. In the Mara reserve of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem, emigrations from the nearby Serengeti, where elephants were being slaughtered by poachers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, arrested the ancient process of regeneration; overcrowded, the region no longer produces new woodlands, and its capability to serve as elephant habitat has been ravaged - adding further impetus to the animals' restless search.

War, which has severely torn Africa's human societies in recent decades, has also torn its environment - and has escalated elephant migrations, sometimes turning whole herds into environmental refugees. In South Africa's Kruger National Park, between 1960 and 1970, elephant populations increased from 1,000 to 8,821, primarily as a result of immigration by animals fleeing gunfire in neighboring Mozambique. While the problem of in-migration was remedied by enclosing the 2-million-hectare park with a fence, the elephant population continued to outgrow its capacity. Kruger can sustainably support only one elephant for every 300 hectares, or a total of 7,000 to 7,500 individuals. Yet, since 1974, the population has risen at a rate of 7 percent per year - an annual addition of 500 elephants that the park cannot support.

Wildlife management proponents worry that Africa's elephant population, if left unchecked, will greatly overshoot the available resources and enter an irreversible decline. They cite a case in the late 1960s, when elephant populations in and around Kenya's Tsavo National Park had reached about 40,000 - a number that virtually every scientist who looked at the problem agreed could not be supported by the ecosystem. Conservationists and wildlife experts argued that 3,000 elephants needed to be culled - deliberately "harvested" - to stabilize the population. Preservationists replied that nature should be allowed to take its course. In an outcome that was to characterize the debate that has continued since, the preservationists prevailed. The area was subsequently hit by severe drought, and at least 9,000 elephants died of starvation. Several hundred rhino died as well - victims of a rampage in which the desperate elephants destroyed not only their own vegetation but the rhinos'.

The African elephant is running out of space among the 100 million people now living in the southern region of the continent. In the 1980s, the expansion of human activity reduced the amount of range available for elephants on the continent from 7.3 million square kilometers to 5.9 million - a 20 percent decline in just one decade. Africa's protected areas (a total of 3.9 million square kilometers of the elephants' range, according to the World Conservation Union), are only a fragment of the wildlands their inhabitants once roamed. Clearly, what's happening here isn't working for the elephants, and it's not working for people either. The question now is whether there's a way to resolve the conflict that can restore stability to elephant populations while serving as a benefit, rather than a threat, to human communities.

When man encounters elephant

To a strict preservationist, and perhaps especially to someone who has not actually experienced what is happening in southern Africa, an elephant may be seen as one of nature's most noble and majestic creatures - a gentle giant that has played large roles in human history and mythology. But to a Zimbabwean or Namibian villager, the damage that can occur when elephants break out of their shrinking confines - whether because of overpopulation or because of growing pressure from poaching, logging, farming, or war - can be traumatic. Elephants have been known to raid crops and grainaries in search of forage and water, uproot orchards, trample crops, crush water lines and dams, wreck buildings, and - if threatened - injure or even kill people. They can terrorize farmers and villagers, causing deep resentments. "Human-animal conflict has replaced poaching as the biggest issue in African conservation today," says Holly Dublin, a senior conservation advisor to the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Kenya.

Just as an uncontrolled elephant population bodes ill for many Africans, however, unrestrained poaching for ivory would virtually assure the elephants' annihilation. Over just one decade, some experts have estimated, the total elephant population in Africa was cut by half - from 1.2 million in 1981 to 620,000 in 1989. The decline was largely the result of increased poaching due to rising demand for ivory and the resulting increase in price - from about $75 per kilogram of raw ivory in 1979 to $300 in 1989. During that period the total amount of ivory traded amounted to nearly 8,000 tons - the equivalent of 500,000 dead elephants. Studies done at the end of the decade projected that without human intervention, the African elephant would be extinct by 2010.

In the same decade, the pattern of elephant killings began to take a greater toll, as most of the large elephants with sizable tusk had been hunted down: now more animals had to be killed to get the same amount of ivory. In 1979, it was mainly bull elephants - with tusks weighing an average of 9.3 kilograms - that were shot. A ton of ivory then represented 54 dead elephants. But as the number of older elephants declined, poachers began shooting younger ones, and eventually they were left to killing mostly cows and calves, which have much smaller tusks. By 1987, a ton of ivory represented about 105 dead elephants.

Concerned about the rapidly diminishing number of elephants, the international community in 1986 agreed to adopt a quota system under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) that allowed between 90,000 and 120,000 tusks to be traded over the next three years. Yet, through 1989, when international trade was banned outright, an estimated 300,000 elephants were slaughtered by poachers. Thus, prior to the ban, some 80 percent of the ivory crossing international borders was illegal.

The quota system provided perverse incentives for governments to "launder" ivory by allowing them to register existing stockpiles regardless of origin. Some of the results might have been predictable: Burundi, for example, had just one elephant within its borders, but managed to export 23,000 tusks - all documented as originating within its borders. The quota system also contained loopholes that were exploited by intermediary countries to avoid the restrictions on raw ivory. For example, traders in Hong Kong imported ivory from Dubai, a free trade zone in the United Arab Emirates, where tusks were superficially carved in order to qualify as "worked" ivory so that they could then be sent into Hong Kong and Japan.

In 1989, several African countries, including Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia, successfully lobbied - with the support of the international environmental community - for a listing of the African elephant in the Appendix I of CITES thereby putting into force the present worldwide ban on trade in ivory. Officials of those countries argued that the only way to stop the poaching was to knock the bottom out of the ivory market.

In the first three months after implementation of the ban, the price of ivory dropped by an estimated 30 to 50 percent, and in the next several years, the slaughter was greatly reduced. TRAFFIC, an organization that tracks illegal trade in wildlife products, has developed a database showing that much less ivory is being traded on the black market now than was traded both legally and illegally prior to the ban. About 60 tons was traded legally in 1989 alone, but only 69 tons has been confiscated in the seven years since then.

Undoubtedly, the rigid nature of the ban helped to save the African elephant from decimation. But the same inflexibility that stymied poachers has also sharpened resentments among many of the communities most beset by elephants. In Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Botswana, there is a widely held view that in addressing the growing conflict between wildlife and people, it is a mistake for the international community to impose a solution that ignores the people who live closest to the wildlife. These three countries plan to seek a repeal of the ban this June, when the 135 member nations of CITES meet in Zimbabwe for the tenth Conference of the Parties. The petitioners have submitted proposals to downlist the African elephant from Appendix I to Appendix II - allowing a resumption of regulated trade in ivory and elephant hides.

In support of their case, these countries warn that the effectiveness of the ban can't last. To find solutions that work over the long term, they say, it will be necessary to find ways of bringing economic benefits to the people whose villages are taking the brunt of the elephant breakouts. And in Zimbabwe, some experts believe they have found such a way.

The CAMPFIRE Model

For the past seven years, a handful of Zimbabwean communities have participated in the management of their local wildlife through the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), which gives local governing bodies stewardship over natural resources as an incentive to maintain them. The program allows communities to benefit from wildlife in a variety of ways, including earning profits from hunting, eco-tourism, and photo-safaris, as well as keeping the meats, hides, and ivory from elephant culls. To the dismay of animal rights groups in the United States, who strongly oppose CAMPFIRE because it relies on selling hunting licenses, the program is partially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which in 1989 provided a 10-year, $28 million grant for administration, training, and infrastructure. Ultimately, the program aims to become self-sufficient - supported by dividends from profitable and sustainable wildlife management in the communities where it is adopted. Under CAMPFIRE, local "villages" - each encompassing about 200 households, or a group small enough to "meet under a tree" - elect committee members to represent them at "ward" meetings. A ward is made of four to seven villages.

Although CAMPFIRE is a relatively young program, the rationale behind it dates back to the early 1900s, when the indigenous people of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) were alienated from productive lands under British colonial rule. The Land Apportionment Act of 1923, which appropriated the best agricultural land for the establishment of European farms, forcibly removed indigenous populations to lands with low rainfall and poor soil - "communal lands" that were largely unsuitable for extensive crop production or large numbers of livestock. In the 1950s, many of these subsistence communities were displaced once again, to make way for game reserves - causing villagers to feel a growing antagonism toward wildlife. Today, many Zimbabweans view opposition to CAMPFIRE as a perpetuation of the former imperialism, now dubbed "eco-colonialism." In the Zimbabwean view, wealthy westerners are asking impoverished Africans to suffer so that wildlife can prosper.

In the years leading up to Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, communal farmers began to press the government to eradicate troublesome wildlife and withdraw restrictions on park entry. In 1975, the Rhodesian government passed the Parks and Wildlife Act, which ended the notion that all wildlife was "royal game" - the exclusive property of the state - and permitted landowners to make economic use of wildlife. Although there was nothing in the law to benefit local communities, the Act was amended in 1982 to enable district councils to be designated "appropriate authorities" over wildlife on communal lands.

To date, 27 of Zimbabwe's 56 communal areas have adopted CAMPFIRE and 13 of them receive income from wildlife. These districts cover an area of approximately 7.1 million hectares, or 18 percent of the country's land.

Currently, most CAMPFIRE revenue is generated from the sale of sport hunting licenses. (CITES does not prohibit hunting elephants - only the importing of ivory from their tusks.) A quota is set for each concession area, using elephant population estimates derived from aerial surveys and other data. The quota is marketed competitively to a safari operator. A hunter must book a safari with the operator, much as one might book a tour. A typical package might include permits to shoot an elephant, a lion or leopard, a buffalo, and some antelope, on a 21-day hunt. The client pays $900 to $1,000 a day, plus "trophy" fees for each animal shot - approximately $10,000 for an elephant, $3,000 for a lion, and $1,500 for a buffalo. Of every dollar paid by the client, it is estimated that the village councils receive 33 percent, with costs accounting for 60 percent and the outfitter's profit 7 percent.

By engaging local people in the management of their own environment, CAMPFIRE - where it has been tried - has provided new economic and ecological stability. The financial benefit is small, by Western standards; in 1995, approximately 80,000 households received some $900,000 in cash dividends. But for many poor communities, it signifies a change in fortune. In the Masoka ward, a 120-household community in the Guruve district, a safari hunting concession in 1994 sold for $73,000, which was used to build a clinic, pay game guards, and fund a soccer team. In addition, each household received a $650 dividend that year - four times the average annual income. Another ward, Chikwarakwara, earned $60,000 - the equivalent of $400 for each of its 149 households. The community decided that each household would keep $200 in cash and invest the rest in a grinding mill and a school. Although the average return to CAMPFIRE household is much lower (about $11 per household in 1995), that is still roughly a 5 percent increase in annual income.

Perhaps equally significant is the finding that many rural communities have seen a greater return from utilizing wildlife than through other, more traditional uses of the land. A study conducted by World Wide Fund for Nature in Zimbabwe showed that in the country's arid regions, which make up eight-tenths of the country, sport hunting and tourism yielded higher returns than raising cattle - an industry that has made large incursions into elephant habitat. In several instances, the benefits received from wildlife has prompted local villagers to convert cattle ranches back into game lands.

Although the primary goal of CAMPFIRE is to benefit local communities, wildlife is benefitting as a by-product. The program has reduced the number of elephants killed both by hunters and by poachers. About 1 percent of the country's elephants are killed each year, a rate easily sustainable for elephant populations which grow at 5 to 7 percent annually. CAMPFIRE has also given local people an incentive to crack down on poachers, both of elephants and of rhino. And the program appears to be improving management of resources other than wildlife, as well; in some areas, tree-cutting has been curtailed, grazing is better controlled, and people have been charged money for taking stone or evicted for burning grass.

Economically, CAMPFIRE is still limited by its inability to make full use of the elephants killed either for hunting or for culling. While the sale of hunting trophies currently yields the majority of revenue, and is independent from the money that could be earned by selling ivory as a by-product of the hunt, CAMPFIRE advocates would like to see a reconfiguration of the ivory trade ban. Downlisting elephants to Appendix II of the CITES convention would allow the rural communities in participating countries to sell their stockpiles of ivory, which would bring another $1.6 million or so to supplement profits from hunting and tourism.

Ecologically, too, CAMPFIRE is still limited - in its capacity to alleviate the problem of stabilizing elephant populations in a region of ever more fragmented habitat. Preservationists are deeply opposed to hunting or culling, and there may be strong political resistance to establishing CAMPFIRE-like programs in other countries. The population instability continues, and could be exacerbated if - as some evidence suggests is happening - poachers begin to gain ground in their black-market subversions of the ivory ban. Ironically, CAMPFIRE's apparent success in discouraging indiscriminate killing of wildlife underscores the fact that as presently set up, it may not be a complete solution to the problem of population instabilities among elephants. According to a game count conducted in October 1995 by Zimbabwe's park and wildlife division, the country has a total of 74,750 elephants, compared to an estimated 52,000 in 1989. Yet, the Minister of Environment and Tourism has determined that the number that can be supported by existing parks is closer to 35,000.

A Time for Triage?

Regardless of their differences over what to do about elephants, there is one point on which everyone who has studied the problem agrees: the African elephant faces a difficult future. The habitat crisis is bound to mean that many elephants will die prematurely, one way or another. If they aren't killed by licensed hunts or culling operations - or slaughtered by poachers - many more will die by starvation in population crashes.

Eventual relief may come from elephant contraception. The U.S. Humane Society is funding a $2.5 million experimental contraception program in South Africa's Kruger National Park, and last November, 21 elephant cows were injected with pig zona pellucida protein. The cows are producing antibodies that are expected to block the site where sperm binds to the surface of the egg, thereby preventing fertilization. At present, however, this method is expensive and difficult to administer. "Elephant contraception is so expensive," notes the South African parks board, "that even if it works, it will most likely be viable only in smaller national parks such as Amboseli in Kenya."

Physically removing elephants and placing them in other reserves, or "translocation," is another sometimes useful tactic. Two years ago, 222 elephants were tranquilized and translocated within South Africa. And the International Fund for Animal Welfare paid $143,000 to transport 158 elephants from Kruger Park to eight private reserves in South Africa. But relocating elephants, aside from the prohibitive costs, would be a temporary expedient at best. There are about 9,900 elephants in South Africa and the country's range capacity is estimated at between 13,000 and 14,000. With its elephant population growing at 7 percent per year, space will run out in the next four to six years.

Some relief could come from the establishment of wildlife migration corridors. Mozambique is planning to create a large park adjacent to Kruger, providing a wide corridor to Zimbabwe's second largest park, Gonarezhou. And, with the help of a $5 million grant from the U.N.'s Global Environment Facility (GEF), a "greenbelt" of protected wildlife habitat will stretch from the eastern tip of Botswana through South Africa and Zimbabwe, and into Mozambique.

Despite these efforts, the elephant population in many areas continues to swell, and even the largest of today's reserves cannot adequately duplicate the wide-ranging process of population thinning once naturally provided by the species' formerly vast range.

To avert a major crash, many conservation scientists advocate managed culling. Some have argued that this is the least cruel way for elephants to die because an entire herd is killed at once. (Members of an elephant herd are known to suffer immensely when another member dies, and the young often starve to death trying to fend for themselves.) Nonetheless, the primary goal of culling, as opposed to hunting, is ecological rather than economic. Culling, in fact, can be a significant drain on a government's budget.

Whether through ecologically managed culling, licensed hunting, or seizures of illegal ivory, as well as through encounters with natural deaths, stocks of ivory are bound to accumulate. Zimbabweans argue that selling this ivory - thereby undercutting the poaching that would otherwise escalate - is a reasonable way to help finance sustainable local management. That, however, would depend on global markets for ivory being reopened. There are some good reasons to consider resumption of ivory trading in the future. And there is an equally compelling argument for maintaining the ban for now.

Holding the Fort

When the ban was first implemented, natural resource economists Timothy Swanson and Edward Barbier predicted that it would offer only temporary relief for the African elephant - that, over time, new demand would be brought on line from places previously priced out of the market. After an initial price fall, they said, the ivory pipeline will reopen and the price will begin to rise again. As prices get higher, poachers will inevitably become bolder and more sophisticated. Added to this is the fact that prior to the ban, traders in Japan and other Asian countries built up stockpiles of ivory, and that as these run out, the pressure in Africa will intensify.

In countries for which ivory was previously too expensive, rising incomes are producing a generation of newly affluent consumers, some of whom are developing a taste for forbidden luxuries. Prior to the ban, 38 percent of the world's demand for ivory came from Japan, but after 1994, according to TRAFFIC, much of the demand shifted to Taiwan, Thailand, and China. In Taiwan, the consumption of ivory has increased tenfold in the past decade.

Unlike rhino horn and tiger bone, ivory holds no myth of increasing male sexual potency, nor does it have pharmaceutical value; it is simply a luxury. In China, it is often carved into traditional statuettes. Only part of their value is aesthetic; possessing these objects is viewed as a way of sequestering wealth, and changing this perception would take much more than simply convincing people that other materials could serve as a good substitute (see sidebar at left).

The pressure on prices is already in evidence. Before the ban, ivory brought poachers $2 to $3 per kilogram. After the ban went into effect, says Richard Leakey, former head of The Kenya Wildlife Service, they were able to get $40 to $50 per kilogram. And, while the ban unquestionably suppressed poaching for several years, the poachers - like roaches - are coming back. In some countries, poaching now exceeds pre-ban levels - a fact ruefully recognized last November at a week-long meeting of officials from the 35 elephant-range nations. Last September, officials in Congo discovered 200 dead elephants, many of them pregnant females or infants, that had been slaughtered by poachers over a number of years at a popular watering hole. The area had recently been placed under the protection of the National Park of Odzala, Congo's largest game park, but unlike Zimbabwe and other southern African countries, Congo does not offer incentives for local communities to protect wildlife, and thus has little ability to ward off poachers.

To the Zimbabweans, the rising demand is a sign that the ivory ban simply can't hold the fort much longer, and that it's better to allow a controlled flow of trade than wait until the deluge. Yet, while that argument may be compelling, there may be an even stronger argument for keeping ivory off the market in the short run. Officials of several African countries, where elephant populations are declining and poaching is a deeply felt threat, fear that opening the gates to any trade now would open a Pandora's box. How, they want to know, would a legally culled tusk from Zimbabwe be distinguishable from one that had been poached in Kenya or Tanzania? And what would prevent poorly paid government officials or game wardens from laundering illegal ivory on the side, thereby perpetuating the poaching along with the legal hunting or culling?

A good tracking technology, to be adequate for a well-regulated trading system, would have to indicate when the animal died, so that ivory that entered the international market illegally, during the ban, could be identified. It would probably have to be capable of identifying specific tusks, so that the work of poachers could be flagged. To date, no affordable method is in sight.

As for the question of government commitment to control ivory stock- piles and prevent corruption, advocates of the ban point to the surge of illegal ivory that entered the market just prior to the ban. It is proof enough, they say, of the danger of a partial ivory trade without effective controls. According to TRAFFIC, ivory thefts from government storage have been reported in Cameroon, Gabon, Cote D'Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Swaziland, and Tanzania. And in Zimbabwe, the Parks Department's "secure" store of ivory somehow diminished from 28,194 tons to 10 tons in the first nine months of last year.

Finding Money for Conservation

Whether or not southern African countries are able to make use of future trade in ivory, getting sustainable financing for wildlife-conservation programs in these countries will be hard. If poaching and illegal trade can be held in check, the ivory trade could become an important part of it.

According to 1992 estimates by the various southern and central African countries, the cost of protecting elephants in Africa at that time would have totaled more than $300 million. Uganda reported that it needed $8.8 million to protect its 1,900 elephants, while Mozambique estimated it needed $15 to $46 million to rebuild its war-shredded conservation infrastructure.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) estimated that the annual costs of elephant management in 1991 added up to $200 per square kilometer. That is consistent with a study by BirdLife International, which last year estimated that the overall costs of managing protected areas in sub-Saharan Africa range from $150 to $350 per square kilometer.

Kenya, unlike most other sub-Saharan African countries, has been able to cover its management costs with proceeds from its booming tourism industry. Kenya spends approximately $409 per square kilometer for management, while all of the other countries for which data are available fall far short of what is required to effectively protect and manage elephants: Botswana pays $51 per square kilometer; Tanzania, $30; Zambia, $9; and Zaire, which at the time of this writing was on the verge of collapse, just $4.

One reason these countries have difficulty conserving their land is that they are so heavily in debt. Recent IMF/World Bank studies show that 33 of the world's 41 poorest countries - those facing "stressed" or "unsustainable" debt loads - were located in sub-Saharan Africa. While at least 10 of these countries are ranked among the World Conservation Monitoring Center's 50 most biologically diverse countries, their debt has left them little to put into biodiversity conservation. On average, countries meeting less than 60 percent of their scheduled debt-service payments have been spending less than $100 per square kilometer on protected-area management.

Setting aside the question of whether future harvesting of ivory for trade will be allowed, the large stockpiles of ivory that now languish in warehouses in places like Harare could go a long way toward jump-starting effective wildlife management. Thirty-three African countries possess a total of 462 tons of ivory (data are still incomplete for 5 countries). Its value is hard to assess, since prices are set on the black market. And inferring value simply from the size of ivory stocks can be deceiving, since in many countries the stockpiled tusks have deteriorated during their years of storage in humid tropical conditions. A conservative estimate of $100 per kilogram of ivory (pre-ban prices ranged from $150 to $300 per kilogram) might place the value of those stocks at $46 million. That's not much, but this is ivory that has already been taken, and it's worth asking why, in a region where people are struggling to survive, it should go to waste. It's also worth asking why, in a region where the elephant population must be controlled to avert the risk of annihilation, future ivory stocks should go to waste.

If the current ban on ivory trade holds its course, of course, other mechanisms will be need- ed to fund wildlife management. In Africa, one solution is to pay for it with aid from the international community. There's a kind of thinking behind this that reflects the growing exasperation of Third World conservationists: that since many Western nations avidly support biodiversity protection, but refuse to allow wildlife funding through the ivory trade, let them pay for it.

Increased international aid for some level of wildlife management has already been promised, at least in spirit. When 165 nations ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), signed at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio in 1992, they committed to "provide new and additional financial resources to enable developing country parties to meet the full incremental costs to them of implementing measures...[italics added]."

The Global Environment Facility (GEF), designated in 1994 to act as the convention's interim financing mechanism, has committed, to date, approximately $420 million for biodiversity conservation worldwide. But donors - with the exception of Norway - are moving away from funding individual biodiversity projects now that GEF specializes in such funding. In addition, donor countries are simply replacing previous biodiversity aid, rather than adding to it.

Another potential source of funding is debt-related conservation financing, or debt-for-nature (DFN) swaps, which could be used to channel resources to very specific conservation needs. Since they were first tried in 1989, DFN swaps have generated funds of more than $125 million in 15 countries, and relieved nearly $136 million in foreign debt - all at a cost to donors of some $30 million. Madagascar, Zambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, and Tunisia have all used DFN swaps in one form or another.

In a typical swap, an international environmental organization might purchase, at a discount of 50 percent or more, part of the external debt owed by a government to large, international banks. The amount of that debt, now owed to the environmental group, is converted into local currency for full (or close-to-full) face value, and usually placed in a trust fund to support conservation activities. Money that would have been used to pay off the debt is then used to finance conservation.

Funding mechanisms such as DFN swaps and trust funds offer two main benefits over traditional aid programs. First, the DFN mechanism can leverage far more than the face value of money paid because debt is bought at a discount on the secondary debt market, then redeemed in local currency at full value. Second, putting money into a trust fund can guarantee a long term-financial commitment, helping to deal with the ongoing costs of financing protected areas, such as paying park officials' salaries and maintaining vehicles.

In 1995, the Mgahinga-Bwindi Impenetrable Conservation Trust in Uganda received $4 million from GEF to fund village-level conservation around two national parks - home to half of the world's remaining mountain gorillas. The fund provides a steady stream of revenue (disbursed in small grants under $1,000), so the government can develop experience and skill in managing money, which was not possible under conventional, short-term, arrangements. Uganda's GEF money, for example, is being used to develop community-based tourist services - handicrafts, guided transportation, and camps - in and around the parks. Since 1991, approximately 24 countries have established conservation trusts ranging from less than $1 million to $53 million.

Another option for sub-Saharan Africa is bilateral debt relief. Because debt in sub-Saharan Africa is primarily official debt (owed to developed country governments and multilateral development banks) rather than commercial debt (owed to international banks), government-to-government debt relief can be more feasible than a DFN swap. European nations (France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy) hold a large portion of the debt in Africa. Under various mechanisms, aid donor countries have worked with debtor countries to reduce and restructure loans - or to forgive them outright - in exchange for agreements to put resources into conservation.

The World Wildlife Fund-US has developed an innovative idea to trade "debt for ivory" - opening a new avenue of dialogue between Africa and the West that could raise revenue in the short term without running the risks associated with trading ivory. The proposal is to reduce and restructure official debt in ways that not only support conservation programs, but also incorporate measures for "disposing of" ivory stocks while effective ivory trade controls are developed. Basically, in exchange for debt reduction, African nations would increase conservation funding and agree to either destroy ivory stocks (as Kenya and Zambia have done in the past by burning them) or store them more securely for an agreed period in order to keep future options open.

This solution would help establish a mechanism to monitor future ivory stocks, and ensure that elephants are managed sustainably. Even in countries with good elephant management, ivory stockpiles will continue to grow each year, and dealing with them will become an important issue. Critics fear that such an agreement would prompt countries to cull more elephants to produce more ivory for debt reduction, but agreements could be negotiated independent of the size of the ivory stockpile, with the focus on wildlife management costs. Where CAMP-FIRE-type conservation programs are in place, compensation could be based on the needs of human communities. Such alternatives, along with an effective monitoring system, would discourage governments from stockpiling additional ivory.

Seeing Through the Rage

While the six-year debate over when and how (if ever) to lift the ivory ban goes on, Western aid for wildlife management in Africa will be essential. The ban is unlikely to be removed until some key issues are resolved - particularly whether allowing regulated trade for countries with non-endangered elephant populations would stimulate illegal killing and ivory trade in other nations, and whether poaching will continue irrespective of the ivory trade ban.

If the ivory trade resumes in the future, it will likely serve as just one part of a bigger picture of long-term conservation and development revenue. Ivory, as a commodity, would generate only a small portion of the total revenue from wildlife, particularly if effective management programs are established and only a sustainable harvest is permitted. Immediate debt reduction linked to the establishment of a conservation trust fund, and utilizing wildlife in one form or another - hunting, eco-tourism, photo safaris - through CAMPFIRE-type programs, will likely form the rest of the picture.

As the drama of rapid globalization unfolds, the ancient carving material of ivory is playing several conflicting roles. In the booming economies of Asia, it is a symbol of wealth; in the consciousness of many environmentalists in the West, it represents the worst of humanity's impact on the natural world; and to many southern Africans it represents potential income from a renewable natural resource that should be harvested sustainably. Which of these symbols prevails could have significant implications for how the global economy will work - or not work - in the next century. Doug Williamson, author of the "Debt-for-ivory" proposal for the World Wildlife Fund-U.S., recently commented to me, "if international interest in resolving the issue of Africa's ivory stocks can help generate discussions on debt reduction and other financial mechanisms to finance long-term conservation, then the elephant could help leverage resources far beyond the fiscal value of the commodity, ivory, in and of itself."

The debate over elephants is an emotional one, and often simplified in terms of a struggle between the advocates of a moral high ground (we shall not kill elephants) and the predatory forces of mammal-killers with machine guns. But under its disputatious political surface, this isn't really about bad people versus enlightened ones; it's about stable systems (economic and ecological) versus unstable ones. What the elephant overpopulation problem in southern Africa is making clearer is that a human economy can't be stable and sustainable unless the resource base that supports it is also stable and sustainable - and vice-versa. If rural villagers and farmers can't see the value of local wildlife to their own communities, they'll either stand by passively while others consume it, or they'll consume it themselves. On an overcrowded planet, the hard lesson is that in ecology as in economics, there are no free rides; in one way or another, everything pays its way.

"Tickling the Ivories" Dead(ly) Metaphor

During the 1800s and early 1900s, the world experienced a rate of elephant loss even greater than in the 1980s - the worldwide take of ivory was roughly 1,000 tons annually. Then, the slaughter of elephants was largely for the production of piano keys in Europe and the United States. In 1910 alone, roughly 238,600 kilograms - or 12,830 dead elephants - went into the production of 350,000 keyboards produced in the United States.

By as early as the 1870s, the quality, and quantity of ivory tusk imports were becoming uncertain and American ivory-goods manufacturers began calling for a replacement for ivory. Celluloid piano keys first appeared in that decade. But it wasn't until the 1950s that a combination of factors - too few ivory workers and the creation of cheaper and easier synthetics - made ivory keyboards industrially obsolete.

Even then, many concert pianists maintained a preference for the smooth, moisture-absorbing feel of ivory. Piano makers experimented with cow bone, fossil walrus and mammoth tusks, and textured plastics in their efforts to replicate the peculiar grip of the ivory keyboard. Finally, a new substance that could satisfy professionals, RPIvory, was developed in 1992 by a friction engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. RPIvory is cast from powdered polymers to reproduce ivory's very irregular and porous microsurface. Finding equally satisfying synthetic replacements in Asia, where ivory is coveted not so much for its physical qualities as for its aesthetic and monetary value, may prove more difficult.

Cheri Sugal is a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.