Elephants: Comment

High prices in international black markets tempt poachers to risk their lives harvesting ivory, threatening with extinction the half-million elephants roaming the African range states (M.Y. Said et al., 1995). In response, Michael Kremer and Charles Morcom (2000) offer insight into how to address this threat to the conservation of elephants and other species used for storable goods. Kremer and Morcom propose a novel solution - use public stockpiling of storable wildlife commodities to reduce the risk of extinction. How the combination of government preferences for revenues, the CITES trade ban, and a limited number of host countries affects a government's conservation efforts when it has built up stores of wildlife commodities from endangered species is shown. The results suggest that conditions exist in which African nations prefer the extinction strategy. This suggests an alternative strategy to enhance the viability of endangered species stocks - international conservation organizations rather than governments should hold the stockpiles.