Ivory Trade

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I do not feel well qualified to speak on this, given the knowledge that has been poured out, but I want to make a couple of points and thank the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, for this useful debate. I have certainly learned a huge amount.

First, I agree with all the stuff that has been said about the destruction of the world’s cultural heritage. That would be a terrible thing. It would be an irreplaceable waste of hours of work and also skills that have been lost in some cases. We may not appreciate until later what skills they are. Two things really worry me. One is that it is impossible to set rules that cover every single artefact. It is often a case of artistic opinion. Flexibility will be required. We have heard how one table might require one proportion and another might require another. There are so many exceptions. In a complex world and with the complexity of the stuff out there, we must be careful not to have very strict rules—which is the opposite of what one noble Lord said earlier. They need to be highly flexible and we need to have a method of making flexible judgments.

The other trouble is that experts have their own biases, and tastes change as life moves on between the generations. Looking back, Georgian things were thought of as great and people turned their noses up at art deco and more recent things; there were times when some of the art was regarded as pretty nasty. I will be very interested to see what happens to the modern art that some people think will not be looked at in 10 or 100 years’ time and will disappear. We just do not know what will happen in future generations. I do not know whether the scrimshaw mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is regarded as something that we should preserve. I can think of many experts who would probably say that they are just little carvings of unknown sailors and ask why they are of interest.

The second thing that worries me is effectiveness. Will it work? Will it help the elephants? The whole point—with which I entirely agree—is that we are trying to preserve a great, noble species that is currently being poached out of existence in the most horrendous ways. It worries me that sometimes the cry of “something must be done” leads to things that do not quite work, because people cannot think of anything better to do and feel powerless. What will this do? Will it move markets abroad to countries that do not really care and create a market there? Will it drive things underground, so the situation does not get any better? If anything, ivory could then fall into the hands of criminals and the criminal fraternity, which would make things worse.

A typical example of that is the war on drugs, which has not worked. I will not go into that, but some of these things put things in the hands of criminals and make everything worse. That is what is happening at the moment because, by creating scarcity, we make things more valuable and expensive. Then suddenly there is an incentive for criminals to spend a lot of money on doing something with it. I wonder: is there no way of farming ivory in such a way as to create a glut on the market and push down its value so that it is not worth financing gangs of poachers? I suspect there is not, or people would have done it. But is there a way for us to incentivise local people when they own herds of elephants by giving them intense support and letting them keep the profits, thus giving them a real reason to guard their animals? Sometimes destruction is not the way to create scarcity; we often see that a glut pushes the price of things down.

As for burning ivory, a brilliant artist said to me last night that, historically, burnt ivory was one of the great black pigments and it has properties that cannot be replaced by burnt bones and other such things that have been tried since. She asked us, if we are going to burn the ivory, to at least use it to make great black pigment, so the animals will not die for nothing.