6 - Demand reduction

Summary

Frederick the Great of Prussia was concerned about the risk of famine due to the dependence of the population on wheat as their main source of carbohydrates. He wanted to diversify away from this monocrop by getting peasant farmers to grow potatoes. However, despite his best efforts to force the new crop on his subjects, he failed; Prussian peasants said that potatoes tasted so horrible that not even dogs would eat them. So he tried a different tack, declaring the potato to be a royal vegetable, only to be grown within the palace grounds and guarded night and day by armed soldiers. Secretly, however, the soldiers were told not to do a very good job. Sure enough, as word spread about the exclusive new royal vegetable, thieves entered the grounds to steal the potatoes, a black market soon emerged, and farmers all over Prussia started to grow the new crop.

I enjoy this story because it shows what can be achieved by the clever use of psychology in marketing, and that the obvious way to achieve a goal is not always the most effective. It is this type of behavioural approach that could be utilized to weaken demand for IWT products. The approach also helps us to better understand what underpins demand for IWT products. For example, as discussed in previous chapters, rhino horn is now more valuable than gold. This is not just as a result of scarcity and market forces, or demand for its medicinal properties (it has none), but because it has become a symbol of conspicuous consumption; a recent trend among Vietnamese millionaires is to have rhino horn ground into expensive cocktails.

Such cultural trends can emerge quite suddenly and unpredictably, leading to increases in poaching and the trade in a particular species, and they can be difficult to identify; it can take time to notice sustained increases in exploitation and trading of individual species, and often by the time the increase is identified, the damage to the species is already severe, as we saw in Chapter 1. The current approach to demand reduction then requires grant applications to be completed and campaigns to be developed to raise the profile of the species involved, which takes time, all the while the species is being lost.