Last week it so happened that the UK government hosted an international conference on illegal wildlife trade and we had decided to discuss Challender & MacMillan’s policy perspective “Poaching is more than an enforcement problem”. Most likely a topic that every conservation biologists have an opinion about.

Challender & MacMillan argue that enforcement will never be enough to combat poaching, and especially the trade in high-value species. Instead they stress the importance of getting locals on-board, using regulated trade to take down prices, and finally to reduce demand through social marketing programs. The authors stress that enforcement approaches cannot address the underlying drivers of poaching and illegal trade, and will therefore fail. They present a few supply-demand graphs and show how shifts in either will affect price and quantity harvested. They have some really good points: demand for high-values species seem to be price-inelastic, meaning that no matter how much the price goes up, people are still willing to buy the product. Since people in Asia are getting better off, this inelastic demand is likely to increase as more people can start to buy the luxury products. The authors explain that the enforcement of trade bans will cause a reduction in supply and hence an increase in price. However, as the price-inelastic demand is increasing this will cause even higher prices and quantities harvested, leading to an extinction pathway.

Solution: regulated trade to increase supply. Nice and neat, as economic models of reality tend to be.

Now over to our discussion. I think we all agreed that Challender & MacMillan’s paper managed to explain the drivers behind the supply and demand neatly, and the problems that these give rise to. However, we clearly disagreed with each other and the authors as to what extent enforcement vs. market driven solutions should be trusted to solve the problem. No doubt, poaching pressure is increasing and population trends decreasing for many high-value species. Whether this can be attributed to the failure of CITES, and enforcement approaches in general, remains open to me.  The critique that local communities have been neglected is very valid, but is a problem that by no means will solve itself even if allowing regulated trade and easing the enforcement. A market led solution allowing regulated trade and redistributing the incomes from that to alleviate poverty in nearby communities is likely to have positive effects and provide an incentive for people to conserve biodiversity in some settings and for some species. However, as the authors point out, for these high-value species the demand is inelastic and the demand is not originating in the local setting. At the local level, getting income from poaching or protection might be indifferent as long as locals get by (have anyone looked at the elasticity of supply for these goods?). Already under current strict regulations, illegal actions at many levels of the supply chain have been detected (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-26167893), such as illegal ivory sold with reused false photoIDs in China. Could there be a danger that less strict regulations just make it easier to disguise illegal products as legal and hence we would end up in a situation where both legal and illegal supply tries to meet the growing demand? There is also the fear that legalizing the trade would make it even more difficult to change the demand as campaigns pointing out the illegality of the trade would lose effect.

In addition to this we speculated about the feasibility of farming rhinos, drew parallels to other illegal things, and considered the impact of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in determining demand and supply.

Daniel W. S. Challender & Douglas MacMillan 2013. Poaching is more than an enforcement problem. Conservation Letters. Early view. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12082