Stark Choices for Wildlife Conservation in Africa
The news that poachers killed 90 elephants with cyanide in Zimbabwe comes as bad news to those of us who have worked in animal conservation in Africa. But Africa seems full of bad news these days, and it’s tough not to become cynical. Perhaps our distant ancestors had it right, getting the **** out of Africa as soon as they could. If it’s not the diseases or the wild animals, the bad politics and toxic religion will kill you.
It seems to me that the choices for nature conservation in Africa are stark: either the people of Africa have to develop a solid middle class, or we have to take the animals and plants out of Africa and import them into a wealthy society to save them. I have been thinking about this for years ever since I met the Tongwe people, a small Tanzanian tribe that were pushed off their land and saw it turned into a national park where I worked. Poaching in the park was always a problem, and it’s not too difficult to sympathize with people who didn’t get the dollar a day jobs the park and conservation programs offered to those outside the park. Poachers that are actually catching the animals aren’t making much by western standards, and when it’s a choice between a poacher feeding his family or seeing them starve only the most heartless conservationists think they should be jailed or worse, shot on the spot.
Some wealthy environmental and conservation groups have tried co-opting the poachers by paying them better and turning them into guards. Other groups have set up co-operatives that help the locals profit from their natural resources through tourism and research. Most of these initiatives have failed and the few that haven’t continue to struggle.
Being free market oriented I’ve thought, “Okay, why don’t the groups and wealthy individuals buy up the land the animals sit on, then fence it.” But there are several problems with this. It has been tried in Kenya and South Africa with limited success. Fences may keep the animals inside the park, but they don’t keep determined people out. Shooting poachers on sight might sound good to some in Europe and the United States, but all it does is piss the locals off. When this happens they can make life very difficult for conservationists in many ways, from stealing their supplies to harassing their staff, and eventually in some democracies, electing politicians who support their positions. After all, chimps don’t vote but Tanzanians do.
So in order to support conservation of the animals, the foreign groups and individuals have to buy off the politicians. This may work for awhile, but it’s difficult for a politician to stay bought when their constituents aren’t very happy with them. Africa also has a poor track record when it comes to respecting property rights. A chimpanzee conservation group could buy up hundreds of thousands of chimp habitat in the Central African Republic only to see a new government take power and decide that the foreigners don’t own the land anymore. What are the groups going to do? Sue? In which court? The one whose Supreme Court Justice is the president’s brother?
The basic problem is that the wildlife we wish to conserve is in Africa, and the legal and economic systems capable of protecting it are outside of Africa.
In order to protect the animals of Africa we are going to have to import one of those. Either we bring the animals to North America and Europe or Africa imports our legal and economic systems. Since the latter should strike some of the politically correct minded as “colonialism,” the likelihood of Africa developing a thriving middle class and a legal system guaranteeing property rights will take much longer than the animals can survive poaching and habitat destruction. Westerners like to blame the ills of Africa on colonialism, and there were some serious ills like King Leopold II’s atrocities in The Congo, but after half a century of independence are the former colonies of France and the UK better off today than they were before independence? Is it possible that the roots of Africa’s problems do not lay in colonialism, but something else like the corruption that is endemic to the tribal and family-based communitarism?
The conservationists I have met who are serious about saving African wildlife tend to be socialists, and they all subscribe to a top-down model of government control over natural resources, or a bottoms-up communitarian approach whereby a whole village has a vested interest in the stewardship of wildlife resources. They must begin to challenge their own beliefs and either come up with new approaches to save the wildlife or buy it and ship it to wildlife refuges in North America and Europe. But they’d better act quickly, because the elephants of Zimbabwe and the rest of the wildlife on the continent are running out of time.
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