By Dr Adam Cruise – University of Stellenbosch
At the 18th Conference of the Parties (CoP18) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), held in Geneva in August last year, South Africa vociferously advocated the notion that the only way to save endangered wild species is to place a commercial value on them.
In other words, if a species provides a financial benefit, a desire to conserve them will naturally follow. The rallying cry – if it pays, it stays – is one that has been emphatically touted by the southern African country for decades.
Interestingly, the South African delegation maintained that this is an African approach to conservation and admonished other countries, many who were in fact African, who dared challenge this view.
Sustainable utilisation
However, the commercialisation of wildlife as a means of species preservation is not an African concept. It’s a conservation approach known as ‘sustainable utilisation’. This is a global concept based on prevailing Western economic values. So prevalent is this Western paradigm that the term is embedded in the United Nations text known as the Brundtland Report (1989) and has been adopted by CITES as well as many governments across the world.
This economically-centred concept was ‘introduced’ to Africa by colonial and neo-colonial occupiers in an effort to protect and maintain the lucrative trade in wildlife products such as ivory and timber as well as for trophy hunting and live animal exports. In Africa, the commercialisation of wildlife was designed for maximum and continual financial gain primarily for the occupiers, often to the detriment of local and indigenous populations.
South Africa is a particularly poignant example of this. Successive colonial and Apartheid governments ensured that profits from wildlife only benefited the European oligarchies. Governmental proclamations of massive fenced-off national parks (like the famed Kruger Park) and thousands of private game farms came after the forced removal of entire communities and at a huge cost to local land rights and livelihoods.
Unfortunately, even with the end of the Apartheid era, this neo-colonial attitude to wildlife still prevails in South Africa. Fenced-off national parks and private farms remain, and the government has wholly bought into the system that the only way to conserve wildlife is to make money from them (be it through trade, trophy hunting or from rampant tourism). It’s as if the analogy of Animal Farm has been played out in the country, and not just in the Orwellian sense.
Farming wild animals
Conservation of wildlife in South Africa is more akin to domestic farming practices than preservation of wild animals in wild spaces. The South Africa government has hailed this as a conservation success, often citing a ten-fold increase in wildlife since the 1960s. They fail to mention, however, that few of these animals exist as wild. They are in fact quasi-agricultural.
For example, around three-quarters of the country’s 8,000 lions are bred in tiny enclosures in deplorable conditions. The lion-breeding industry supplies canned hunts for trophy hunters and, more recently, for the export of bones for consumption in South-East Asia. CITES permits the annual export of 1,500 lion skeletons from South Africa to Laos for the production of tiger wine – a trade that has already seen the decimation of wild tiger populations in South-East Asia.
Rhinos are bred for their horns, which are allowed to be traded domestically, while other species are intensively farmed as prime breeding studs, or to be hunted for trophies and slaughtered for their meat. These animals live on farm lots similar to those designed for cattle, sheep and other livestock. Intensive breeding species has led to the artificial cross-breeding of buffalo, sable and roan antelope and impala for bigger horns and a variety of unnatural colour variations. They are traded at auctions throughout the country for millions of dollars. These hybrid species, obviously, have no value in conservation.
Many private game reserves are open for tourists offering photo-opportunities of the Big Five, but these too are more like farms or glorified zoos than truly wild spaces. These properties tend to be too small for wildlife to roam freely with many animals separated from one another by barriers and fences.
In the latest development, the South African government is initiating a move to place thirty-three wild species, which include elephants, rhinos, lions, hippo, giraffe and zebra, to be reclassified from ‘wild ‘to ‘farmed’ thus opening the door to the production and sale of these species as meat for human and animal consumption. Given the current theories around the origin of COVID-19 and the prevalence of other zoonotic diseases in South Africa such as the periodic bird-flu outbreaks in the ostrich farming industry, one has to question the thinking behind this move.
Economic exclusion
Another problem of this system is that the majority of wild animals have no economic value and consequently are not considered to have any conservation value. South Africa’s unique reptile diversity, for example, remain largely neglected in an economic-centred climate that views wildlife not for its intrinsic value, but in terms of its commercial use. Other wildlife from bats and rabbits to toads and beetles fare no better. According to the Red Data Book of South Africa, about 20% of the country’s mammals are threatened, while 17% of the country’s largely endemic reptiles are at serious risk of extinction.
Furthermore, the commercialisation of wildlife in South Africa continues to displace rural black communities to this day, more than two decades after the end of Apartheid.
A study in 2014 found that in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, more than 90% of mainly white-owned commercial farmers and private landowners had converted from traditional livestock farming to more economically viable game hunting farms. The findings showed that converting livestock farms to non-labour intensive hunting operations results in greater displacement of farm labourers whose ancestors had lived on the land for centuries.
The real African approach to conservation
If one is looking for a true African approach to wildlife conservation, one needs to look no further than the traditional rural communities that have lived among Africa’s wildlife for eons.
Many rural communities throughout Africa treat their role with wildlife and the natural environment as interdependent. Humans exist in a community that depends, not only on other humans, but also on animals, plants and other elements in the natural world. These communities are concerned about the environment and human relationship with a broad biosphere. This worldview creates an obligation to protect the natural world in its entirety, and crucially involves the conservation of all living beings.
Thus, separating wildlife from the natural space for the economic benefit of the privileged few, does not sit well in the traditional African worldview. Nature, and the wild things within it, belongs to all. They are not to be exploited and the overall integrity of the natural environment ought be maintained.
This is a conservation concept that has worked across Africa for millennia, it is one reason why the continent still boasts significant wildlife populations in wild spaces. This truly African outlook is perhaps one that, given the dire state of the planet’s human health and natural environment, should be allowed to be reintroduced and flourish.
