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SUSTAINABLE WILDLIFE CONSERVATION
One of the most misunderstood topics, when it comes to wildlife, tourism, National Parks, Wildlife Reserves, etc., is that of wildlife conservation.
Most people think that "Conservation" means "Make sure that you don't touch anything".
Well, in the real world it does not work exactly like that...
Nature is a resource
Plants take their energy from the sun, and their nutrients from the soil. Animals take their energy and nutrients from plants, from other animals, or from both. They also need water to function and stay alive.
Mankind needs nutrients from plants and from other animals, and water. The only resource we have is the Earth, and everything that grows and lives on it.
Nature needs to be managed
In order to obtain the millions of tons of daily food that we need, we have to cultivate plants and rear animals. This needs large expanses of land, on which wild animals and wild plants are not welcome.
Animals depend on plants, and in the same way plants depend on animals: insects, birds, and mammals spread their seeds, help with their fertilization, bury the seeds in the ground, provide manure, till the soil.
Everything is linked. If there is no fertile soil, there are no plants; if there are no plants, there are no animals, and vice-versa. If the wild animals and plants die, the land will die, and our domestic crops and animals will die too.
The greatest threat to wildlife is agriculture: it destroys natural habitats, cuts the migratory routes that are vital for wildlife reproduction, and destabilizes the exchanges between ecosystems.
This results in the "Wild" being broken into thousands of "wild islands" on an ocean of human-occupied land, more or less closed ecosystems that are not self-healing when things go out of control, be it from drought, from animal overpopulation, from animal extinction, or from unregulated logging.
Wildlife management, and nature's management in general, is our responsibility as humans, because we can't escape the fact that such management is needed, and that we are the only living beings on the planet who can do the job.
Wildlife is the single most precious resource of Uganda
In addition of being essential for all life, wildlife is the key to tourism. Nations have based their wealth on tourism. Uganda has one of the most favourable environments in the world for wildlife, and for tourism: abundant rains, fertile soil, wonderful climate, stupendous landscapes.
Unlike industries like the oil or mining industry, where the majority of the direct benefits go to the Government and to large Companies, tourism brings business and profit to all the layers of society: the taxi driver, the waiter in a restaurant, the hotel owner, the local craftsman, the youth employed in a lodge far away from town.
Disappearing Wildlife
The problem is that in many areas of Uganda, like in the rest of Africa, wildlife has been poached almost to extinction. Even the National Parks are in a state of ecological disrepair that leaves the wildlife professionals shaking their head. Fifteen years ago, there were so many Uganda kobs by the road passing along Queen Elizabeth National Park, that you almost had to slow down when driving. Where are they today?
Forty years ago, Karamoja was a paradise for wildlife. Some of the largest herds of roan antelopes and topis were there, giraffes roamed the plains, wild animals filled the bush. Today, the landscape is empty. There are an estimated ten to twenty roans left in South Karamoja, the last in Uganda. Animals have been poached into extinction, tens of thousands of them.
Local Communities and Wildlife
In Africa, some of the poorest human populations live right by many National Parks, or Wildlife Reserves.
Often, the Park or Reserve has been established on what was their ancestral land, and they have been chased away or forbidden to go back to their pastures.
Why are these people not allowed to touch anything just so that busloads of smiling tourists can take pictures of wild animals, while these same animals raid shambas (farms), destroy vital crops, kill cattle, maul and kill people?
How do you expect the local villagers to NOT poach, when they are chronically short of every basic thing, and their highest hope of income from the Park is to sell an old calabash to a tourist for three times its market price?
What right would you have to arrest a poacher who killed a gazelle to feed his children, when the gazelle is on his forefather's land, and you don't allow him to benefit from that land?
Wildlife is decimated throughout Africa with snares, traps, poison, spears, AK47. Sometime just for greed (the rhino...), but most of the time simply as "bush-meat". Because people have no rights on it, are poor, are hungry, and only see wild animals as nuisances belonging to the Government or to strange foreign tourists.
African wildlife is an African resource
But wildlife is a resource.
African wildlife is an African resource.
It is the local people's resource, not the resource - or the problem - of a faraway European or American old lady, who pressurizes all sorts of groups to interfere with what happens here.
Conservation: sustainable or non-sustainable?
There are two ways to try and protect wild animals from extinction.
You can pass laws to this effect, and enforce them. You can spend millions of dollars in law enforcement personnel and equipment, you can displace human populations, you can fight day and night against the people who live on the land. You can arrest people who poach, you can send fathers to jail for trying to feed their children from what is on their rightful land, you can try and contain hordes of hungry and angry people out of ever more threatened patches of "protected" land.
You will work AGAINST the local communities, and like ants, no matter what you try, they will always come back. They will always outnumber you, and they will always be hungrier than you.
This approach is not sustainable. It has not worked, anywhere, anytime: if you blink an eye, if you relent in your vigilance, if the funds dry up, if the authority in charge gets sloppy, you lose years of efforts in a very short time.
This approach is not morally defendable, not on the ground when you are confronted by a herdsman whose cattle is eaten by lions, by a farmer whose crops and livelyhood has been raided by elephant, by villagers whose children, husbands, wives, parents have been mauled by leopard, trampled by elephant, ripped open by hippo. You can't justify keeping a hungry man from feeding himself from his own land - and whatever Reserve or Park you may set apart in law, you are depriving someone from the land where his fathers lived.
But there is another way. You can address the problem at its roots: work WITH the local communities, instead of working AGAINST them.
Sustainable wildlife management has to benefit the people of the land
If the local communities benefit directly from the proceeds of consumptive and non-consumptive wildlife use, you instantly change thousands of poachers into the best guardians of the wild animals.
This is the key to sustainable wildlife management: by giving a value to wildlife, the people on whose land the wildlife lives become "owners", and with the proper guidance, they start to manage "their" wildlife resource so that it becomes sustainable. And in the world, only what has a value endures.
The only way to give value to wildlife, is to establish business ventures based on wildlife. Contrary to popular belief, properly regulated hunting is not about killing animals. It is about managing animal populations so that their numbers increase to their optimum levels, and take the excess animals in order to make the enterprise viable.
This is exactly what a cattle keeper does. He takes care of his cows and makes sure that they are healthy and have good pasture, yet he sells them to be killed. The cows going to the abattoir pay for the children's school fees, for every day's food, for the house.
The cows are the cattle keeper's wealth, and because they are his wealth, he will make sure that they grow and reproduce, that there are always enough cows so that he can live from the excess of his herd.
When the local communities are the major beneficiaries of the hefty Animal Fees levied on hunted animals, they become business partners, and their interest is suddenly conservation, not destruction. The local communities benefit, the wildlife benefits, the Reserves and Parks benefit, the tourism industry benefits, the country benefits.
No other approach has sustainably worked, ever, anywhere wildlife competes with impoverished local communities.
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