Crush and Burn: How the destruction of ivory fails to save elephants

Abstract

Elephant populations have declined by half since 1979. In response, activists have promoted destroying confiscated and stockpiled ivory to “send a message” to reduce elephant poaching and ivory demand. As a result, more than 280 tons of ivory has been destroyed between 1989 and 2017. This is the first paper to estimate the causal effect of the amount and location of these destructions on the elephant poaching rate across African and Asian countries with elephants. I use data from CITES’ Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants program from 2003 to 2019, paired with information on ivory destruction events. The main result is that the destruction of ivory does not reduce poaching rates. On the contrary, in African countries with elephants, ivory destructions increase poaching rates, with negative spillover effects from in-country events on the rest of the continent. This suggests the negative supply shock from the destructions dominate and incentivize poaching by increasing the (illicit) ivory price. For sites in Asia there is no evidence that elephant poaching rates respond to ivory destructions.