3 October 2002

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43^rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Dear Sir / Madam,

Matthew Scully does a disservice to African nations by suggesting that their desire to utilize elephants as a resource is based on some new "libertarian" philosophy being propagated in the United States ("Don’t Resume the Elephant Harvest", 1 October 2002).

Their position is as old as mankind. Poor people in countries such as Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia simply wish to use their own nations’ resources in a responsible and carefully managed way.

By supporting a ban on ivory trade in 1989, the U.S., at no economic cost to itself, succeeded in appearing "environmentally responsible" to its own nationals while helping to create unnecessary hardships in African communities. The U.S. decided to support Kenya's lack of management which lead to a drastic decline of its elephant population while opposing the sustainable use approach of the Southern African countries which resulted in a substantial increase of their elephant populations.

Far from being a success, the ban shut down successful conservation programs that used limited ivory sales to maintain healthy elephant populations. These programs were geared to the reality, so often brushed aside by western commentators, that these countries are poor and need to extract income from their resources in order to satisfy basic human needs. Adding insult to injury, some elephant populations are now so large that they are destroying crops and farmland, compounding the economic difficulties created by the trade ban.

The ideology of open-ended international trade bans is pushed relentlessly by fundamentalist animal rights groups and is rigidly applied to virtually all species of wildlife. This proves to be self-serving since these groups also manage to sustain themselves extremely comfortably with the billions of dollars raised each year for their "save the…" campaigns.