Delegitimizing Ivory: The Case for an Ivory Trade Ban Treaty

Abstract

In Romain Gary’s novel Roots of Heaven, Morel, a French national in despair over the plight of Africa’s elephants, resolves to promote an international convention that will ban all hunting of elephants. The setting is colonial Chad in French Equatorial Africa in 1953, and, evocative of the current crisis, the story relates that thirty thousand elephants had been killed that year alone. The theme of the use of international law to protect the elephant weaves throughout the narrative. Morel is obsessed with gathering signatures to his petition for the new treaty, to counter “the notoriously insufficient laws for the protection of the African fauna.” The key international treaty at that time was the 1933 Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State. This convention had been adopted at the urging of scientists anxious over the devastation of elephant (and other wildlife) populations, by colonial governments more concerned over the implications for the ivory trade. The convention regulated hunting for trade and for trophies, as well as subsistence hunting, and provided for the conservation of the elephant as part of a management plan for this very lucrative colonial trade. Admittedly, although its primary objective was the steadfast supply of elephants for their tusks, this treaty did stalwartly stand between traders, governments, and consumers on the one hand, and the final demise of elephants on the other.