Southern Africa’s wildlife trade agenda implodes, and with it the veneer of a ‘successful’ conservation model

Southern Africa’s conservation story – the one the region has been selling internationally for years – finally met a hard wall at the 20th CITES Conference of the Parties in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The collapse of ivory, rhino horn and giraffe trade proposals at CITES CoP20 was not a surprise to most observers in the room. What was surprising is how thoroughly the region’s long-standing justifications fell apart under scrutiny.

These weren’t strategic setbacks. They were systemic failures, failures of argument, failures of credibility and failures of a conservation model that has relied more on rhetoric than ecological reality.

Namibia’s ivory-sale gambit to offload 46 tons of stockpiled ivory on the international market, rejected by almost 79% of parties, was the clearest signal yet that the world no longer buys the storyline of southern African exceptionalism. Its proposals for fewer restrictions on rhino horn – one for white rhinos, another for black rhinos – were dispatched with equal force. And a multicountry attempt to weaken giraffe protections also died quickly.

By the end of the session the question was no longer why the proposals failed. It was: how did southern African governments convince themselves these ideas had a chance at all?

Policy failure #1: populations presented as a conservation triumph when they are not

For years, southern African officials have pointed to apparently “healthy” elephant and rhino populations as proof that their conservation systems justify trade. But this framing collapses under inspection.

Rhino numbers – especially in South Africa – have been maintained largely through coercive, intervention-heavy, quasi-agricultural models that include domestic markets, dehorning, sedation cycles, intensive fencing and 24-hour armed guarding. This is not ecological resilience; it is industrial wildlife management. And it is wildly expensive.

Elephant numbers are similarly misrepresented. Concentrations in some areas are touted as “overpopulation”, even when those same elephants are restricted by fences, pumped waterpoints and spatial constraints that artificially inflate local densities while obscuring regional declines and poaching hotspots.

CITES parties saw through this. Population numbers, detached from ecological context, no longer persuade anyone.

Policy failure #2: the ‘sustainable use’ narrative has become detached from ecological reality

Southern Africa’s version of sustainable use has drifted far from the principle it claims to champion.

The model increasingly prioritises economic extraction over ecological function – treating wildlife as an income source, not as part of a larger system. This has led to a series of policy disasters, including:

• South Africa’s catastrophic expansion of the captive lion breeding industry, built under the same “sustainable use” mandate now being used to justify ivory and horn trade;
• The overstatement of elephant “carrying capacity” figures without accounting for high levels of poaching, climate-driven habitat change or fragmented movement pathways; and
• A reliance on stockpiling ivory and horn as if they are stable financial assets, ignoring the political and market realities that make those stockpiles effectively worthless on the legal market.

When these practices are held up as success stories, they reveal more about political messaging than conservation.

Policy failure #3: misreading global politics — repeatedly, and at high cost

Southern African delegates walked into CoP20 arguing that the world was ready for an opening of the ivory and horn trade. This belief was not based on diplomatic reality but rather on selective reading and policy echo chambers.

The global context has shifted entirely. China – once the primary consumer market – has since closed its ivory trade. Most Asian states, with the exception of Japan, have adopted bans or strict restrictions. African range states outside the south remain traumatised by the poaching waves of the 2000s and early 2010s. There is no appetite for reopening markets. No credible pathway for demand-side control. No political interest in testing trade experiments again.

The numbers at CoP20 reflected this with brutal clarity. Southern Africa misread the room. The region continues to behave as though it is 1997, when they first convinced the world to offload their stockpiles of ivory, not 2025.

Policy failure #4: ignoring – or denying – the legacy of the 2008 ivory sale

The 2008 CITES-approved ivory sale, in which southern African countries were authorised to sell more than 100 tons of ivory to China and Japan, is still seen by many African and Asian nations as a prelude to widespread poaching. Parties who lost tens of thousands of elephants during the years that followed will not risk another legal ivory pathway – no matter how small, how controlled or how isolated.

Southern African governments have tried for years to dismiss this history. They failed again in Samarkand.

Policy failure #5: a conservation economy built on speculation, not stability

Southern Africa has consistently argued that wildlife must pay for itself. But its preferred mechanism – consumptive commercial trade – has proven incapable of delivering reliable results.

The rhino breeding industry in South Africa is deeply mired in controversy over the domestic rhino horn market. Trophy hunting revenues are concentrated in a few operators rather than dispersed among communities. Ivory sales have been politically dead for more than a decade. And the giraffe proposal exposed how stretched the logic has become – attempting to justify regulatory weakening based on narrow, trade-driven incentives rather than ecological considerations.

Viewed together, these elements do not form a conservation model. They form a market strategy – and a failing one.

A reality check delivered, loudly

The International Fund for Animal Welfare’s statement after the vote captured the sentiment that dominated the room. Africa director James Isiche said the proposals “would have been untraceable, unmanageable and unenforceable” and warned that reopening trade “would have placed rhinos and elephants across Africa and Asia in grave danger”.

This is not an emotional argument. It is a policy one. And it reflects a consensus far broader than the NGO world. CITES parties – mostly African states outside the south – have concluded that southern Africa’s trade agenda is incompatible with global enforcement capacity, global political trust and global market risk.

What this means

Southern Africa now stands at a crossroads. It can continue pushing the same proposals, based on the same assumptions, underwritten by the same narratives of “success” that no longer convinces anyone. It can blame international politics and anti-use ideologies, as it has at previous CoPs. It can insist that the world does not understand its realities, or it can confront the truth: the conservation model southern Africa has spent decades promoting is no longer credible.

The region’s wildlife numbers are heavily manufactured. Its trade arguments are outdated. Its policy logic is disconnected from global political and ecological realities. The world has moved on. Southern Africa has not, and CoP20 made that undeniable.

A reckoning that could still become a turning point

This moment does not diminish southern Africa’s role in global conservation. It exposes the flaws of a single ideology within it. If the region begins reassessing the assumptions that led to this collapse – the reliance on its version of sustainable use, stockpiling ivory and rhino horn, the overconfidence in trade solutions, the misrepresentation of ecological conditions – it could still reposition itself as a leader. But that requires abandoning a narrative that CoP20 has now rejected outright.

Southern Africa did not lose in Samarkand because the world opposes it. It lost because its conservation model has failed – ecologically, politically and economically – and the rest of the world has finally called its bluff. DM