
Kenya Burns Huge Pile of Ivory Tusks to Protest Poaching - mizzao
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/04/30/world/africa/ap-af-kenya-ivory-burning.html
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mizzao
Interesting approach and political statement, but the economist in me really
doesn't like it.

It seems like making ivory scarce is going to encourage more poaching since
demand is high and poaching lucrative. Another approach would have been to
dump (or slowly sell) the 105 tons of ivory on the market, driving down prices
drastically such that poaching would be very unprofitable.

It's unclear if this would have a net positive or negative effect on the long-
term demand for ivory, but it seems it would almost certainly reduce poaching
in the near future.

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dalke
The goal is to have no market. Your inner economist thinks there must be a
market. These two are at odds.

Your inner economist is correct. There will always be a black market. The goal
then is to change the demand. One way is to change the social understanding.

Take "blood diamonds" as an example. That was a social movement to tie
diamonds to diamond production used to fund wars and atrocities. That was
enough of a concern that the diamond industry started to certify the origin of
their diamonds.

By publicly declaring "ivory has no worth", and with visual displays like
this, it makes the point that it's simply not acceptable to have any trade in
ivory, and that even possession isn't worthy goal.

If there is a market of "legal" ivory, it becomes harder to identify illegal
ivory. We see that now, where people will advertise that a given ivory is pre-
ban even though it isn't.

Also, if the government starts to get an income stream from selling captured
poached ivory, I think the government will start to plan its budget around
that income. I think about the various places which marketed a state lottery
plan as a supplemental income source for schools or historic preservation,
only to find that it became a way to shift away existing funding, making the
schools, etc. dependent on lottery income.

