Is poaching has militarized, ivory trafficking, now capable of transporting contraband from the remotest corners of the African bush to East Asian markets thousands of miles away.

    Conceptualized in broad terms, there are three major components to the ivory value chain: poaching, trafficking, and retail. African actors are dominant from the poaching phase to the point when ivory is consolidated and hidden inside a container, while Asian and other organized crime groups control the supply chain from containerization all the way through the shipping and transport systems to market.

    The ivory trade can be attacked at any of these stages, but each has unique difficulties and time sensitivities. Securing elephants with more rangers and drones is expensive, and the mismatch between ivory’s value and local incomes ensures that there will always be a nearly inexhaustible supply of poachers. Further, applying hard security measures, such as injecting weapons and money into already failing governanhasprofessionalizedce and security systems, may only exacerbate underlying problems and create new conflict actors in the future.

    Demand-reduction on the retail end is also problematic, primarily due to the time constraint. Demand reduction is the only permanent solution for a trade that is driven by black market economics, but changing cultural attitudes and consumption preferences is a very lengthy process that can take decades to materialize, and moreover is not conducive to dictation by outsiders.

    Given current rates of poaching, the time lag for demand-reduction is simply too long. Per the latest estimates, 7.4% of the elephant population is being killed annually, at an accelerating rate, shrinking the timeframe for elephant survival across most of the species’ range to within 10-15 years. Disruption and suppression in the intermediate phases, however, is likely to be a key point of vulnerability in the ivory trade system.

    Targeting syndicate profits and focusing on increasing the rate of seizures can induce higher levels of operating cost and risk, forcing syndicates out of business or displacing them into an alternative trade. Supply chain disruption is particularly attractive as it targets those actors who benefit the most from the trade: the traffickers, middlemen, and logistics specialists who are drawn by illicit profits and not poverty. While supply chain disruption is likely to be a high-impact short-term strategy, it is inherently temporary.

    Poaching will displace, middlemen will shift areas of operation, trafficking routes will change, and law enforcement will have to adapt accordingly.