By: Godfrey Harris & Daniel Stiles

The year was 1862. Abraham Lincoln was in the White House. “Taps” was first sounded as a lights-out bugle call. And Steinway & Sons was building its first upright pianos in New York.

The space-saving design would help change the cultural face of America. After the Civil War, many middle-class families installed them in their parlors. The ability to play the piano was thought to be nearly as important to the marriage potential of single ladies as their skill in cooking and sewing, signaling a young woman’s gentility and culture.

The keys on those pianos were all fashioned from the ivory of African elephants. And that is why one of these uprights, the oldest one known to survive, in fact, is stuck in Japan.

The director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service recently issued an order prohibiting the commercial importation of all African elephant ivory into the United States. (Commercial imports had been allowed in some instances, including for certain antiques.)

The Obama administration is also planning to implement additional rules that will prohibit, with narrow exceptions, both the export of African elephant ivory and its unfettered trade within the United States.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has said that these new rules will help stop the slaughter of elephants. But we believe that unless demand for ivory in Asia is reduced — through aggressive education programs there, tougher enforcement against the illegal ivory trade and the creation of a legal raw ivory market — these new American regulations will merely cause the price to balloon and the black market to flourish, pushing up the profit potential of continued poaching.

In short, these new rules proposed by the Fish and Wildlife Service may well end up doing more harm than good to the African elephant.

What these regulations will also do is make the import, export and interstate sale of almost any object with African elephant ivory virtually impossible. Anyone who owns any antique African elephant ivory — whether it is an Edwardian bracelet inherited from a grandmother or an ivory-handled Georgian silver tea set owned by an antiques dealer — will be unable to ship or sell it without unimpeachable documentation that proves it is at least 100 years old, has not been repaired or modified with elephant ivory since 1973, and that it arrived in the United States through one of 13 ports of entry.

The story of the Steinway underscores the complexity, rigidity and absurdity of these rules. The piano was salvaged years ago by Ben Treuhaft, a professional piano technician. When his wife took an academic job in Japan, he shipped the piano along with their other household possessions to Tokyo. They moved to Scotland after the Fukushima nuclear accident three years ago, leaving the piano in storage in Japan to be shipped later. Now Mr. Treuhaft is ready to return the piano to the United States and place it in the hands of a friend who planned to display it at her piano shop.

But the piano remains in Japan. It lacks the paperwork necessary to clear customs in the United States because Mr. Treuhaft failed, when he shipped the piano abroad, to obtain the required export permit identifying the ivory keys and the piano’s provenance. In the past, the government might have exercised some discretion over Mr. Treuhaft’s oversight. But no more. Moreover, to meet the personal-use exception for an import, the piano would have to be shipped back as part of a household move, and he wants to send it to a friend.

So the piano that Steinway says is its oldest known upright is stuck in Japan.

Of course, Mr. Treuhaft is not the only one who is or will be hurt or inconvenienced by this draconian order from the Fish and Wildlife Service, or the new rules that the administration seeks to impose. Musicians already complain of a burdensome process and monthslong delays in securing permits to take their instruments containing ivory abroad. And collectors, gun owners and antiques dealers say they have been blindsided by the proposed rules, which will effectively render their African elephant ivory pieces worthless unless they can meet the extremely difficult standards necessary to sell them.

We suggest a different approach. We should encourage China, where much of the poached ivory ends up, to start a detailed public education campaign that underscores the damage done to elephant populations by the illegal trade in ivory. We also need more aggressive enforcement of anti-poaching efforts in Africa. And we should figure out a way to manage the trade in raw ivory to protect elephants. For instance, several years ago, ivory stockpiles owned by several African countries were sold in a series of United Nations-approved auctions in an effort to undercut illegal ivory trafficking. The proceeds went to elephant conservation efforts. This is a better approach than destroying these stockpiles, as the United States did last fall to six tons of ivory.

Leaving Mr. Treuhaft’s piano in Japan will not save African elephants. But it will further endanger them and diminish the lives of those who recognize and value the role of ivory in history and culture.

About the Authors:
Godfrey Harris directs the Political Action Network of the International Ivory Society.
Daniel Stiles is a wildlife trade consultant.
The above was published on The New York Times website Opinion Section on March 26, 2014.

By: Godfrey Harris

The effort to get the article that Dan Stiles and I wrote on the “Wrong Way to Protect Elephants” (New York Times, Op-Ed, March 27, 2014) into print felt like a career in itself. It all started in mid-January when I was told by a friend at the National Association of Music Merchants convention that a historic 1862 Steinway piano with ivory keys was trapped in Japan because of Fish and Wildlife Service obduracy. It was the kind of story the Political Action Network of the International Ivory Society had been looking for. It not only provided a human dimension to the hardships of the proposed new rules to ban the trade and movement of ivory, but it dealt with an instrument that gave the rural Midwest its cultural base and clearly illustrated why ivory has a practical as well as artistic importance in history.

I called the source of the news in Oakland, took down the pertinent facts, invited Dan Stiles, one of the most knowledgeable people involved in the ivory trade, to join me, and started searching for a lead for the story. Once I could tie the fifth upright ever made by Steinway to the introduction of Taps as a Civil War bugle call, I had the connection I wanted. I asked my editor to review the finished document before he sent it off on our behalf to The New York Times. I said if the Times were to pass on the article, then he was to submit it to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the San Francisco Chronicle in that order. The final draft went out on February 4 and 10 days later, we got a Valentine bouquet: The New York Times said that they would publish the article.

But nothing happened. Other major news events seemed to erupt and preempt the space available for the Steinway story — the severe winter weather in the East and the drought in the West, the demonstrations and Russian activity in Ukraine, the Academy Awards, the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and on and on. All understandable, yet it still looked like the Times had spiked our piece with no intention of publishing it as a way to keep the article out of rival papers. We asked again in early March about the chances of publication; the Times guy said that week for sure. But again nothing happened. The next week I had a flash: Why not suggest to the editor linking publication to the meeting of the Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking on March 20 in Washington. We got a “good idea” back from the editor, but still more nothing. Then Tom Mossberg’s article talking about the hardships the new rules would have appeared on page A-15 of the paper and Chris Conway, a Senior Editor of the Op-Ed page, said he and his people would work on the piece for publication the week of March 24. This time all hell broke loose.

I had always heard that there was a friendly rivalry between the staff of the Op-Ed page and the editorial writers. If the Times said one thing editorially, the Op-Ed folks would look for something that challenged that point of view. Since the Times had editorially endorsed the need for the new rules in late 2013, our article claiming that the new rules might actually kill more elephants than save them seemed right for publication. But that said, the Op-Ed editors wanted to get our 780 words absolutely right. They treated it as if it were a Ph.D. thesis. Their fact checker went to work. He called the guy who owned the piano in Scotland, he checked with my source in Oakland, he talked with a prominent guitar expert in Nashville who had given me the original tip. He asked for articles that would buttress our main arguments — and we found a half-dozen or so of them for him to review.

When we thought we were done, Conway came back to me and said that while we had explained what was wrong with the regulations, we hadn’t offered any new ideas to make the situation for elephants better. He wanted more and he wanted it fast. Luckily, Dan Stiles was visiting Los Angeles from his home base in Kenya. He and I crafted a few sentences that I would then dictate over the phone to Conway. He took them down on what sounded like an old manual typewriter. He was reverting to the role of a copy desk editor in an old black-and-white movie as if he were holding the bulldog edition for the latest news from the scene of a grisly murder.

In the end, however, our final sentence came too late to make the next day’s edition. Worse, Conway now had time to go back to fussing with elements of the piece to make it even better. With another writer on staff, he decided to insert the word “African” every time the word elephant appeared in the piece. I objected. I thought it sounded redundant. I was told Dan had okayed the change. So I shut up. Then in the final final draft I was Emailed, I saw this sentence: “The keys on all these (upright) instruments were all fashioned from the ivory of African elephants.” I pounced. I called the Times, but learned that Conway was in a meeting. I left a message noting that we have no proof that the ivory that Steinway used was from Africa; a lot of Asian elephant ivory was in use in the days when the piano was built. Conway called back late in the evening of March 26: He said he had the proof; his fact checker had called Steinway and their historian had confirmed they had used African ivory on the piano stuck in Japan.

Based on our experience of getting this one article into America’s newspaper of record, I can say that the paper does indeed offer “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

About the Author: Godfrey Harris directs the Political Action Network of the International Ivory Society. The above article was published in May 7, 2014 issue of the International Ivory Society newsletter.

By: Corr Mitchell LLC

The Federal Government is about to crush small businesses across the United States in the name of stopping elephant poachers in Africa. Unless regulators and law makers get up to speed about an emotional issue that could drive a knee-jerk reaction at the expense of jobs, hundreds of law abiding businesses and art collectors will be hurt by an unnecessarily heavy-handed policy.

On February 11, 2014, the White House along with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (“USFWS”) announced the National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking & Commercial Ban on Trade in Elephant Ivory. Without input from the legislative branch, the executive branch announced its plan to do everything in its power to criminalize the domestic trade of elephant ivory and any items that contain ivory. Full policy implementation would make it practically impossible to sell, refurbish, repair, embellish or otherwise transfer ownership of anything containing elephant ivory, rendering those items worthless. While talking at length about the emotionally charged topic of elephant poaching in Africa, the policy only superficially addresses the successful measures the United States already has taken or how this policy will hurt people who have never broken any laws or contributed to elephant poaching.

Unlike the current policy, the USFWS (the agency with primary responsibility for regulating ivory) issued a 2012 Fact Sheet acknowledging the effectiveness of current laws by stating they “do not believe that there is a significant illegal ivory trade into this country.” From 1989 to date, the US has made “significant seizures” of illegally imported ivory which accounts for about 30% of all reported seizures in the world. The Service said that most of that ivory was “unwittingly purchase[d] and import[ed] into the United States only to have [the ivory] confiscated at the ports.” That ivory, collected over 25 years since the 1989 ban, was recently crushed by the government for publicity to launch this most recent effort to ban domestic trade.

The same 2012 USFWS Fact Sheet also acknowledged that outside the United States, especially in Asia, there remains a brisk trade in poached elephant ivory. Without explanation, the USFWS now portrays the United States as the second largest market requiring drastic action, the hope being that killing the domestic trade of pre-ban ivory in the United States will affect demand of illegally traded ivory in China.

Painfully absent from this discussion is the impact on businesses and art collectors in the United States who have always followed the law. Unlike in China where poached elephant ivory costs $1500 per pound, in the United States pre-ban ivory is plentiful and only about $250 per pound. Before the 1989 ban, there was already a lot of ivory in the country that could be traded, whether from existing commercial stocks, excess ivory stored by museums, or ivory that came on the market in estate sales when collectors died or when recycled from other items like piano keys. This ivory has been used in products including antique restorations, musical instruments, chess sets, tool and knife handles, pistol grips, and custom pool cues or jewelry, not to mention a variety of religious and cultural items. Businesses in this industry are typically artisans who make, sell, repair, refurbish or embellish items. Because of existing export restrictions, big businesses avoid using ivory, isolating the market from areas of the world where poachers trade their ivory.

Full domestic ban implementation threatens to wipe out small businesses and render items containing ivory worthless on legal markets without affecting demand in the areas of the world that pay poachers to kill elephants for their tusks. The proposed policy threatens to impose documentation requirements on pre-ban ivory that are impossible to meet, leaving businesses with legal ivory stock and products that contain ivory that they can no longer sell and for which they have not been compensated. Families will have heirlooms that can only be stored or destroyed. People with musical instruments won’t be able to repair or refurbish them, and artisans who dedicated a lifetime to learning their craft will become obsolete if not criminal.

Instead of a heavy-handed ban that will expand the international black market, officials would be wise to tighten areas where illegal ivory could leak through the system. The problem is at the borders – if poached ivory can’t enter this market, then domestic trade of legal ivory need not be impaired. Most importantly, the government should be reaching out to the citizens who the policy will negatively affect to implement rules that do not punish innocent people. The government does not appear to have made any significant attempt to evaluate the economic impact of this ban, nor has it consulted with most affected businesses to develop less draconian means for achieving its stated goal.

The speed with which this domestic ban is being implemented has taken most businesses by surprise. The government’s confiscated ivory crush was announced in September 2013, the President established an advisory group in December, the policy was announced on February 11, and USFWS issued their first directive affecting international trade changes on February 26. USFWS intends to issue rules on domestic trade starting in April.

Businesses, art collectors and everyone concerned about the domestic ivory ban need to act now. Start by contacting Senators and Members of Congress to inform them on the issues. Because time is of the essence, phone calls are best with follow-up e-mails. Find your Member of Congress here, Senators here.

Second, spread the word among your peers and your customers. This isn’t just about poached elephants – it is about people losing their livelihoods and/or their investment in treasured items unnecessarily. The other side of this story needs to get out, and the people who are affected need to tell it.

About Corr Mitchell LLC:
Law firm of Corr Mitchell LLC is located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They specialize as general counsel to small businesses who do not employ a lawyer in-house, and back up the in-house counsel for medium and large businesses who need additional support. The above article is posted on their website.

By: Dalya Alberge

Antique dealers and museum curators have attacked a proposed US ban on American commercial trade in objects made of elephant ivory as a philistine wrecking act. They claim certain provisions in the National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking will have a drastic impact on exhibitions, scholarship and the trade in antique masterpieces, while doing nothing to stop the slaughter of an endangered species. The warning was sounded by art experts after the US government announced in February that it would no longer allow commercial imports of African ivory of any age, including antiques – which were previously exempt. Domestic and export trade will also now be limited to artefacts more than 100 years old.

In an effort to stop the massacre of thousands of elephants each year, the new rules will revoke the previous exemptions for antique ivory. But the art world points out that antique ivories – often carved with virtuosity centuries ago – came from tusks that were gathered from elephant “cemeteries”, and created when these magnificent creatures roamed the plains of African and Asia in their millions. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that there were some 5m elephants in Africa until the 1930s, numbers that have dwindled by at least 50 per cent.

No art lover wants elephants to suffer, but curators and dealers oppose the new ban on two counts. The first is that since almost all the artefacts in question were made decades ago, it would have little or no effect on the slaughter of elephants at present or in the future. The second is that it would hinder art historical and curatorial work, as well as the antiques market.

Some feel that museums will be deterred from acquiring artworks seen as tainted under the proposed legislation. James Cuno, president of the J Paul Getty Trust, whose ivory holdings include a 1680s goblet – a tour de force of carving – feels that “it would inhibit our appreciation … of these antique objects” and their cultural role.

Martin Levy of Blairman’s, a leading London dealer, says: “The impact on scholarship, museum collections, private collectors – not to mention on commerce – would be huge and pointless.”

Art experts are astonished that the legislation would at the same time allow imports of “elephant sport-hunted trophies” at “two per hunter per year”. New York dealer Scott Defrin mocks what he sees as double standards: “They’ll allow hunters to bring home trophies from Africa,” he says, “ … but not antiques!” His antique ivory sales to museums have included a 17th-century St Sebastian to the Metropolitan in New York. These pieces aren’t blood-covered tusks, Defrin says: “They were made hundreds of years ago.”

US legislation on the international and domestic trade in elephant ivory has long been notoriously bureaucratic. Art specialists had urged change, but nothing like this. They wanted “passports” for individual pieces, rather than a complex system that involves a series of licence applications and six-month delays for approval. Dealers fear that the US legislation will be replicated in Europe, killing the trade completely.

New Yorker Anthony Blumka deals in the medieval, renaissance and baroque periods, when ivory was the preferred material for church and royalty. At Maastricht he will exhibit a 14th-century diptych with scenes of the Passion of Christ. He fears that restrictions will drive the trade underground: “A collector is not going to stop wanting what he craves,” he warns.

The art world is all the more unnerved because the US ban coincides with reports in the British press that Prince William had told primatologist Jane Goodall that he wants ivory antiques in the Royal Collection destroyed and that Prince Charles, his father, has requested their removal from his homes. A spokesman for the prince refused to confirm or deny a private conversation.

Critics also point to the irony of Prince William’s pledge to save wildlife coinciding with a hunting trip with his brother Harry. The wild boar and stags they hunted are not endangered, but the animal blood on the princes’ hands did not help their cause.

A full illustrated version of this article appeared in The Financial Times on March 8, 2014.

By 1979 vicuñas were almost extinct in the Andes. Now there are more than 400,000.

By: Arancha González

The United Nations will mark the first official World Wildlife Day on March 3. This.is welcome news, because unless a solution to the global poaching problem is found, iconic species such as the tiger, rhinoceros and elephant face extinction within 20 years.

At the recent London Conference on illegal Wildlife Trade, 46 countries and 11 international organizations signed a declaration that sets out a three-pronged approach to protect wildlife. The declaration calls for increasing enforcement of laws against poaching, reducing demand for wildlife products, and the “sustainable utilization” of wildlife.

While enforcement and demand reduction are necessary and clear, less is known about what sustainable use actually means-and how it can solve the over-harvesting and poaching of wild animals and plants.

Combating illegal trade . has been the focus of much recent attention. But the real question is how to set up a well-managed legal trade that is sustainably managed and benefits the poor rural communities where many threatened species are found.

Giving rural communities the right economic incentives is critical to protecting wildlife. This is difficult in countries with weak governance and high levels of poverty. Trade bans are often undermined by strong incentives to supply the market demand for the animals and the products that can be harvested from them. Bribes and intimidation from poachers and illegal wildlife traders erode such incentives even further.

Still, good examples of legal trade do exist.

Peru has turned sustainably sourced products into export successes over the past few decades. Its sustainably sourced “superfoods”, including sacha inchi, maca and cat’s claw, have gained world-wide fame for their health benefits, and as a consequence, have provided rural Peruvians with increased incomes. Peru and other Andean countries have also been very successful in bringing vicuña populations — a relative of the llama — back from the brink of extinction. That achievement dates to a 1979 agreement in which vicuña range states gave communities on the high-altitude plateau in the An- “:J dean regions of Peru, Bolivia and Argentina the rights to shear, process and sell the fine wool. Communities have protected the animals from poachers and rebuilt the vicuña population to more than 400,000.

Africa also offers examples of wildlife sustainability. In Namibia, an ecotourism program helps villages to manage communal conservancies and protect wildlife, including rhinos and lions. A number of wildlife projects in Namibia are funded in part through the sale of hunting permits for old and sick rhinos selected by professional conservationists for culling.

Some wildlife value chains are more difficult to manage sustainably or ethically. A 2012 report by the International Trade Centre, which I run, found that the trade in Southeast Asian python skins is worth $1 billion, half of which is estimated to be illegal. The skins, used mainly by the luxury fashion industry, are harvested and processed in rural villages before being exported to Europe, thus creating economic opportunities for thousands of rural households in the region. My organization is currently working with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Kering, the parent company of Gucci, a key buyer of python skins, to strengthen transparency in the trade and ensure that smuggling, the abuse of permit systems, and poor animal welfare standards are addressed.

There is no single way to manage a sustainable trade in wildlife. A successful legal trade .needs an enforceable system of export permits and harvest quotas- and animals and forests would still require protection through enforcement. A successful legal trade also depends on animal reproductive rates.

Wholesale opposition to legal trade in wildlife is mostly found in rich countries, which ignore the high financial and social costs to already vulnerable societies in enforcing trade bans. They also ignore the potential benefits of taxing the wildlife trade. This money would otherwise go to poachers. Isn’t it better to have it go to the poor?

It may not be possible to stop the wildlife trade-the worldwide demand for these animals and the products they provide is just too strong. But this World Wildlife Day, let’s focus on designing a global legal framework to ensure that communities have the incentives to conserve wildlife, rather than destroy it.

About Arancha Gonzáles:
Ms. González is the executive director of the International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. The above article was published on March 3, 2014 in The Wall Street Journal.