Ivory dreams Am I the only one reluctant to see those elephant tusks go?

News reports have it that five tons of seized elephant tusks were crushed into obliteration last Friday by our well meaning government officials.  These tusks were estimated to be worth US$10 million, and had been slowly accumulated over 13 years.  Over the years, the Bureau of Customs and other enforcement agencies have been collecting the contraband, stashed somewhere safe, until now.

In a supposed symbolic move, however, environment authorities took the unusual move of bulldozing the ivory tusks into, well, ivory dust.  Why?  The reason we are given is that this gesture will show the world how sincere the country is in its efforts to combat the ivory trade.  Environment Secretary Ramon Paje is quoted by the press as saying “this act is a strong statement to the rest of the world that the Philippines is serious.”

Really now.  The pragmatist in me rebels at this reasoning.  Was it necessary to destroy the whole lot?  Couldn't we have been symbolic with maybe one ton, and then created opportunities with the other four?  Might it not have been possible to hire unemployed citizens (creating job opportunities), teach them how to carve raw ivory into beautiful objects (skills training) and then sell the finished products into the retail market (revenue generation), thereby adding to the coffers of government (addressing the budget deficit)?  Then we could have pumped the money into more government services (economic programs) or even for emergencies like typhoons and floods (disaster relief operations).

I am sure there are plenty of other, brighter ideas out there for how to deal with the stash.  Donate them to a museum, perhaps?  Use them as decor for the soon to be renovated airport, much like the Coconut Palace, and create an Ivory Castle?  I don't know.  How about check if there are medicinal properties to the ivory and give them to scientific institutions that can properly research into this idea?  Make them into pianos and we can turn into the piano capital of the world!  Yes, I grow more bizarre, but compared with the idea of destroying objects with economic utility to serve as a “symbolic message”, which seems to me to be a fairly bizarre idea by any standard, I stand an even chance of making sense.

The end result of this is, from my perspective, five tons of opportunity just became five tons of waste to be trucked (expense) and dumped (pollution).  Oh yes, and one grand symbolic gesture where we show the world, in general, and ivory traders, in particular, our massive finger.

We are so macho.  Burning ten million greenbacks just to satisfy a need to show off, is how I characterize it. Oh yes, it's a great statement.  Notice how we milked it by inviting foreign press?  Even that journalist who had exposed the priests in the Philippines as greedy consumers of illegal ivory, Bryan Christy, had been invited to witness the destruction.  So much PR capital to be made with this ceremony.

I predict, now that we have demonstrated so convincingly to the smugglers our resolve to fight the illegal ivory trade, that they will just look for other trade routes and other transit countries to operate.  They will avoid our country, and just look for somewhere more convenient.  Which is a good thing in one sense, because we just made it harder for them to exist.

But, on the other hand, if we had let the smugglers continue trying to exploit our country, and instead, we had spent ten million dollars into improving our customs and law enforcement agencies, maybe we'd have even greater chances of capturing the other tusks that would otherwise make it through illegally.  Then we would have captured more tusks, and maybe generated more revenues.  We could have helped fight the illegal trade and at the same time, helped the economy.  Does that sound like a win-win solution?

Of course, there's the risk that our stash just might fall into the wrong hands.  As admitted by our officials, destroying the stockpile was one way to eliminate the opportunity for corruptible government employees from getting their hands on the tusks, and making money from them.  But that's the usual risk we face with any government asset, like cash, or forfeited jewelry and electronics, or sequestered houses and buildings.  We don't destroy all of them on the fear they'll be spirited away, do we?

As admitted by Wildlife Bureau Director Theresa Lim, these five tons had been accumulated from 1996 to 2009.  So they had survived opportunistic scheming officials all those years. There's historical basis to conclude that they could, in fact, survive a few more years until they can be turned into hard cash by a determined government, through a process that could even be policed by environmental activisits, if we really wanted tighter control measures.

(Wait, what happened to the tusks seized from 2010 onwards?)