Allow or ban the trade?

• About 140 000 elephant killed between 2007 and 2014. • Rhino wiped out in 22 of the 33 countries where they used to roam. • Ban in trade saved some species, but failed elephant and rhino. • Cites has to pick one solution: in flora and fauna, species by species. decreased by 30% .

Countries in Southern Africa advocate a system of sustainable use, in which animals are traded and hunted to raise funds for more conservation. In developing states, conservation competes with issues such as water for a small budget.

But their northern neighbours have borne the brunt of poaching. Countries such as Kenya say all trade in endangered species — be it rhino or lion or elephant — has to be banned. That ban will allow enforcement agencies to seize any shipments of the species and close down markets. Cote d’Ivoire said: “A ban would end all future sales of ivory and give elephant a chance to recover.”

At Cites, this meant two weeks of acrimonious comments passed across the African divide. Most of these came in prefabricated meeting rooms. Economists, hunters and environmentalists would often present the same facts, but read contradictory meaning into them. One senior economist said of the pro-elephant trade position that “it is very hard to see the logic in their argument”. Zambia’s environment minister asked the not-so-rhetorical question: “Why do people sit back and punch holes in the work of others?”

Cites works around polarised positions by requiring any change in the status of an animal to be carried by two-thirds of voting members. In Sandton, those votes showed little consistency. At one point, South Africa was given permission to trade in the Cape mountain zebra so that it could pay to conserve the species. But four days later, Swaziland’s proposal to do the same thing, albeit in white rhino, was shot down.

Cites was riddled with similar inconsistencies. But the one constant was that nobody could give a working solution for saving a species if someone else wants it dead. The debates will continue to the next meeting in three years, and animals will be wanted — dead or alive.