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We posted an article entitled “The Future of Hunting” because we believe that the author is absolutely correct in stressing the three key principles that should be followed by the hunting fraternity, and which should be enforced, namely (i) transparent implementation of and compliance with scientifically grounded sustainability rules, (ii) full recognition of the role of local rural people in wildlife management and their rights and responsibilities regarding natural resource management, and (iii) the behaviour of hunters in the field and how they conduct themselves and present themselves to the public.

We clearly need to correct the conspiracy theories being peddled regarding the institutional arrangements concerning the organisations that support communal conservancies in Namibia. First, WWF in Namibia is a programme office of WWF-USA. It is not a country office. No environmental NGO in Namibia works under WWF. Namibian NGOs supporting conservancies are all independent organisations with their own, independent boards. Second, NCE is an independent, umbrella membership-based organisation for mainly Namibian environmental NGOs. WWF is not a member of NCE and has no position or involvement in any NCE governance structure or decision-making.

We need to explain the arrangements between the Namibian NGOs that support communal conservancies. These NGOs have created an umbrella CBNRM support organisation called NACSO (Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations). Only Namibian organisations supporting communal conservancies are eligible for full membership of NACSO. NCE is not a member of NACSO because it does not work at the conservancy level. Non-Namibian organisations working on CBNRM, such as WWF, although a highly valued partner, do not qualify for full membership – they are Associate Members with no voting rights. This has been the situation for almost two decades.

The decisions made by NACSO are made by their Namibian NGO members which have Namibian boards of trustees / directors. They work to help facilitate and develop conservancies and support their natural resources management and development. NACSO has three working groups through which much of the coordination, information sharing, and support is channelled by the member support NGOs. These are (i) the Natural Resources Working Group, which assists with wildlife monitoring and wildlife management, (ii) the Institutional and Governance Working Group, which supports issues around the management of conservancy committees, AGMs, financial management, etc, and (iii) the Business, Enterprise and Livelihoods Working Group, which helps conservancies set up joint venture initiatives with the private sector (e.g. to establish lodges), as well their own managed businesses (e.g. camp sites, craft centres, local guiding). All these processes contribute to an evolving self-sufficiency, democratisation and sustainable resource-based economy in communal areas, based on people’s rights and responsibilities over natural resources.

Is everything perfect? Certainly not, there are many challenges – but it is vastly better than the situation at the time of Namibia’s independence when rural communities had no rights, were totally disempowered, wildlife numbers were very low and people got no benefits from their natural resources. There is certainly plenty of scope for improvement, and all partners are working with conservancies on a daily basis to continuously help get things better and better. It is a process which is generally moving in the right direction. And like democracy, imperfect as it is, there is currently no better model around.

We also need to explain that the support organisations are only one part of the process in establishing wildlife numbers, trends and quotas. The conservancy members themselves, their community game guards and committees are fully involved (they live with the wildlife on a daily basis), as is the Ministry of Environment & Tourism, and in some areas, also the private sector joint venture partners, e.g. in the tourism sector. Wildlife numbers and trends are determined using a number of methods – fixed route vehicle or foot transects using internationally accepted methods such as “Distance” (used in many parts of the world), observations from game guards, water hole counts, camera traps and periodic aerial surveys. Both the fixed route and aerial survey methodologies applied in Namibia have been reviewed by accredited international scientists and found to be of high standard. Different methods are used in different regions and for different species. There is no one system that gives perfect results for all wildlife in all areas. The most useful approach is to use a combination of standardised methods, and particularly to look at species population trends.

Finally, it is important to understand that wildlife populations are not, and should not be, static. They are increasing and decreasing each year and over longer cycles, while some species (e.g. elephant and buffalo) seasonally move across international borders, further contributing to annual fluctuations in census findings. Without this dynamic nature there is little resilience in ecosystems. And in arid zones, this dynamic aspect is particularly apparent and important. So, animals move over large areas and outside places where they might have been seen last year or the year before. And animals die because of drought. But they recover relatively quickly when conditions improve. This is the nature of arid and hyper-arid zones. The larger the open system, the more robust and resilient it is.

Management of wildlife in arid areas also requires a deeper level of ecological understanding and some aspects might seem counter-intuitive. For example, when entering a dry cycle, it might be appropriate to harvest animals while they are still in reasonable condition, put the income in the bank, so that fewer animals die in the drought, so that those which come through the drought are in reasonable condition and are well placed to breed successfully to start rebuilding the population. This is also better for veld management. The old agricultural subsidy system in Namibia, where the state providing fodder, resulted in too many animals staying on the land and, after the first rains, hammering the veld and not giving it time to sufficiently recover. This was one of the contributing factors that led to the bush encroachment we see today.

Short-term (over a number of years) population fluctuations should therefore not be cause for concern, provided that long-term monitoring and adaptive management mechanisms are in place, that governance systems are working fairly effectively and that the broader public understands that arid systems are very dynamic and that wildlife populations vary in response.

An Interview with Dr. Chris Brown by Gail Potgieter.

Recently, the Chinese government attempted to partly lift the ban on rhino horn use in Traditional Chinese Medicine (see this New York Times article). The ban on endangered wildlife in Chinese medicines has never been enforced with any commitment or conviction by the Chinese authorities. The fact that these products, like pangolin scales and many others, have no proven medicinal properties does not seem to deter the growing number of users who presumably get some placebo effect enhanced by the conferred status of being able to afford elitist medication.

Chinese traditional medicine is said to be a US$ 100 billion industry. The Chinese government has identified this as a growth industry, to compete worldwide with Western scientific approaches to medicine – particularly in Africa. If this is the case, we can expect the demand for such Chinese traditional medicines to grow, and pressures on wildlife to similarly grow.

Within this context, Namibia and other African countries must carefully consider their response to the Chinese stance. Some critical questions must be asked before it is too late for our rhino population. Dr. Chris Brown, CEO of the Namibian Chamber of the Environment, believes that legalising the trade in rhino horn could provide a way forward for Namibia and its neighbours to resolve the current poaching crisis and create real incentives for rhino conservation in future. However, such a proposal often provokes serious questions about if it could work, and what the future of rhinos would be under the legal trade scenario. In this interview, I put some of the critical questions to Dr. Brown about legalising the trade and how, in his view, it would contribute to rhino conservation.

Question: Why do you think that legalising the trade in rhino horn is a better option than continuing to improve rhino security in Africa and clamp down on the trade in Asia?

Answer: At the moment, demand for rhino horn is increasing, leading to higher prices, more professional and ruthless poaching gangs, and greater danger to our anti-poaching rangers. I do not believe that we will reverse this trend by simply gearing up and doing more of the same. For those who think this continuing arms race over illegal rhino horn will provide a solution after so many years of not succeeding, I refer them to a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Question: How would Namibia supply enough horn for sustainable legal trade, and how do you envisage a transparent monitoring and auditing system would work?

Answer: A national dehorning of all rhinos would take place in national parks (with the exception of those in the immediate vicinity of tourism facilities such as Okaukuejo, Halali and Namutoni in Etosha National Park), and on communal and freehold land, on a two to three year cycle. Each removed horn, as well as all stock-piled horns, would be micro-chipped, a DNA sample taken and a passport issued. Horns would be strategically released for sale to pre-approved buyers under a de Beers type marketing system. The passport would accompany the horn throughout its life. A small royalty would be taken on each sale to cover the cost of dehorning (done by nationally approved teams), DNA analysis, storage, management and sales. The bulk of the horn value would revert to the owner or custodian of the rhinos from whence the horn came, i.e. to the national parks, communal conservancies, private owners, or MET for custodian rhinos.

Question: At the moment, trade in rhino horn is banned by the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). How would Namibia start trading rhino horn with this ban in place?

Answer: Ideally Namibia’s trade would be under CITES approval with international monitoring and audit procedures in place. Alternatively, if blocked by the CITES member states, it should trade despite CITES, and then transparent monitoring and auditing becomes even more imperative.

Question: At the moment, all black rhinos in Namibia belong to the state, whilst white rhinos can belong to private owners. How would those living with and/or owning rhinos (including private land owners and people in communal conservancies) see the benefit of the rhino horn trade?

Answer: Current approaches to black rhino ownership should be relaxed to allow private and communal ownership, as is the situation with white rhino. Freeing up legal wildlife markets inevitably delivers conservation dividends. Furthermore, custodians and owners of land should be encouraged to expand their wildlife operations to include both species of rhinos (where habitat is suitable), and land under livestock should be encouraged to expand to include wildlife with rhinos. In reality, no real encouragement would be needed, as market forces would provide all the necessary incentives. To facilitate the process, financial support should be offered, e.g. AgriBank could expand its loan facility to allow farmers to invest in rhinos and other wildlife under approved business and management plans that include adequate levels of wildlife expertise.

Question: If rhino horn sales were legalised, would the rhino owners/custodians be the only beneficiaries, or do you forsee a broader economic impact for Namibia?

Answer: Land under wildlife with rhinos and with an international trade in rhino horn in place would generate far greater returns per hectare than any other form of land use, short of finding a diamond-rich Kimberlite pipe on your land (the diamond resource would be depleted over time, but the rhino horn resource would grow). I have estimated that an international trade in rhino horn would contribute close to N$2 billion per year to the Namibian economy, and this would grow as rhino populations expanded. Tax revenue to the state would be significant. A legal trade in rhino horn would help enable land reform, create jobs, address rural poverty, help adapt to and mitigate climate change, and mitigate many other challenges. In short, there is no other natural renewable resource that comes close to the value of rhino horn that would prosper in the semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions of Namibia and Africa.

Question: This all sounds very good from an economic point of view, but will it have a substantial benefit in terms of rhino conservation – particularly with regards to reducing poaching and illegal trade?

Answer: Dehorning of the national rhino herd would significantly reduce the incentive to poach – the risk-to-reward ratio would be heavily skewed towards high risk and low reward, and the markets would simultaneously be well supplied with legal horn. Some people have said that there may be an increase in rhino calf mortality in areas with lions and spotted hyaenas if rhino mothers don’t have horns. The data is equivocal. Based on limited sample sizes it is not statistically confirmed that calf losses are higher to mothers that have been dehorned. And even if the losses were somewhat higher, this would be largely insignificant against poaching losses of adult animals.

Legalising the rhino horn trade would bring many buyers into the open, where their businesses would be legitimised. Businesses far prefer to be legal, where business terms are well understood, and rules are clear. They would be unlikely to jeopardise their legal standing by dealing in “blood rhino horn”. And DNA sampling would quickly reveal illegal horn on the market. Legal dealers would be inclined to give information to law enforcement on illegal dealers to reduce competition.

Question: The idea of legalising the trade in animal parts inevitably brings up the question of trading in other endangered species – like tigers and lions for their bones, and elephants for their tusks. How do you feel about trading those animal parts?

Answer: The situation varies from species to species. Trade and market forces under specific circumstances can contribute significantly to the conservation status of many species and to achieving desired conservation outcomes. Trade and markets do not work for all and they do not work under all circumstances. Only in cases where markets can promote the conservation status of wildlife, are they worth pursuing. Species that are typically unsuited to market forces are slow-breeding, occur at low density and are difficult to monitor and manage. Examples would include pangolins, large birds of prey and some marine mammals. Circumstances that would be unsuitable for market forces to deliver good conservation outcomes are where rights, responsibility and accountability over wildlife have not been devolved to the appropriate level of management by means of policy and legislation, where institutional arrangements to administer and manage the resources are not adequate, and where there is a weak regulatory framework. It is important to note that these operational conditions do not need to be perfect – they need to be sufficient to deliver conservation benefits and have a positive trajectory over time.

We need to clearly differentiate between the tiger and lion bone industry and that of rhino horn. Rhino horn is a renewable resource. It can be harvested without harm to the rhino - the horn simply regrows. While this is happening, rhinos fulfil their ecological role in the environment, breed and, through their huge value, safeguard landscapes under natural vegetation and provide collateral protection to other indigenous biodiversity. And if this initiative is strategically linked to incentives for open landscapes, it could turn around the harmful game fencing mania we currently face, where the landscape is fragmented and wildlife populations become increasingly isolated. Indeed, the value of rhinos and their horn could be the economic driver for rewilding much of Africa. Africa could then really build on its global comparative advantage – its wildlife – as a core plank for long-term development.

By contrast, there is no conservation value to be had from the tiger and lion bone industry. Lion farming, in small enclosures, adds no value to lion conservation. It is an unpleasant, corrupt industry with huge animal welfare issues. South Africa has done itself severe reputational damage by its engagement in the lion bone industry and its legalised sales quota of lion bones to Asia. Namibia should steer well clear of any such trade, with severe penalties for transgressors.

A trade in ivory, by contrast, would have conservation benefits. Ivory derived from natural mortalities and from the legal management of elephant populations would help offset the cost of living with elephants, on both communal and freehold land. However, exporting raw ivory would be to lose much of the potential value. A local ivory carving and manufacturing industry would add considerable value to this natural product. In addition, the production of elephant leather and use of elephant hair would increase the value of elephants on farmlands and open up areas to elephants where they are currently not wanted. This would reduce conflicts and lead to an increased population over a larger range – all desired conservation outcomes.

Question: You mention the benefits of farming rhinos in extensive ecosystems, which provides an economic incentive for conserving large landscapes; however, one could produce more horn per year if the rhinos are kept at high densities under intensive management conditions (i.e. in captivity). What incentives do you think are needed to ensure that rhinos are kept as part of large, natural ecosystems, rather than as captive farm animals?

Answer: I would make it a condition of black rhino ownership that they could only be acquired, held and sold on if they were kept in large open systems. This would apply to black rhino ownership into the future and would be a permit requirement. Second, large open systems offer both conservation and economic benefits to the owners and custodians. In addition to harvesting of rhino horn, such systems would support a full suite of wildlife species around which various tourism products could be developed. They also allow sustainable wildlife harvesting for meat and trophies, and live sale of surplus high value species. This provides a diversified set of economic activities.

Concluding remarks: I believe that the time is right for Namibia, preferably in partnership with neighbouring countries, to take some bold steps regarding rhino horn and rhino management, for the purpose of long-term rhino conservation. The demand for rhino horn will grow. We can grow the supply. I believe we can do it in a way that protects, conserves and grows our rhino populations while harnessing the economic opportunities thus created and realising a suite of other conservation and socio-economic benefits. Namibia would then be “optimising its global comparative competitive advantages” as we are challenged to do by Vision 2030. Not to do so would have us miss huge economic opportunities while we witnessed the inevitable decline of rhinos, accompanied by a “rhino war” of attrition where everyone would be the loser.

Interview by Gail Potgieter

Dr Chris Brown, Namibian Chamber of Environment writes:

I am not a hunter. Nor have I ever been. I am a vegetarian (since the age of about 11), I am part of the environmental NGO sector and I have interests in the tourism industry in Namibia.

So, it might surprise you that I am a strong supporter of the hunting industry in Namibia, and indeed, throughout Africa. Having said that, I should qualify my support. I am a strong supporter of legal, ethical hunting of indigenous wildlife within sustainably managed populations, in large open landscapes. The reason is simple. Well-managed hunting is extremely good for conservation. In many areas, it is essential for conservation.

There is much confusion and misconception, particularly in the urban industrialised world and thus by most western tourists that visit Namibia, about the role of hunting in conservation. Urban industrialised societies, and I include many biologists and recognised conservation organisations in this grouping, see hunting as undermining conservation, or the anathema of conservation. And they see protecting wildlife and removing all incentives for its consumptive use as promoting and achieving good conservation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Much of the hunting and sustainable utilization debate within conservation has been taken over by the animal rights movement. I have sympathy for people who stand up for animal rights – I think we all should. None of us want to see animals suffering or being treated badly by members of our species. But the problem arises when animal rights agendas are passed off as conservation agendas. Animal rights agendas are not conservation agendas. Conservation works at the population, species and ecosystem levels. Animal rights works at the individual level. And what might be good for an individual or a collection of individuals might not be good for the long-term survival of populations, species and biodiversity. Take a simple domestic example. When the farm carthorse was replaced by the tractor, carthorses no longer had to work long hours in the fields. But they also no longer had a value to farmers. Once common, they are now extremely rare. Indeed, carthorse associations have been established to keep these breeds from dying out. The truth is, if animals do not have a value, or if that value is not competitive with other options, then those animals will not have a place, except in a few small isolated islands of protection. And island protection in a sea of other land uses is a disaster for long-term conservation.

Animal rights are important. But for wildlife they must be placed within a sound conservation and animal welfare setting, where conservation decisions on behalf of populations, species and ecosystems take priority over the rights of individual animals, but with due consideration of their welfare. Ethical and humane practices are an integral part of good conservation management and science.

The wildlife situation in Namibia provides a very good example of this. When the first western explorers, hunters and traders entered what is now Namibia in the late 1700s, crossing the Orange / Gariep River from the Cape, the national wildlife population was probably in the order of 8-10 million animals. Over the following centuries wildlife was decimated and numbers collapsed, first by uncontrolled and wasteful hunting by traders and explorers, then by local people who had acquired guns and horses from the traders, then by early farmers, veterinary policies and fencing, and finally by modern-day farmers on both freehold and communal land who saw wildlife as having little value and competing with their domestic stock for scarce grazing. Traditional wildlife management under customary laws administered by chiefs had broken down under successive colonial regimes. By the 1960s wildlife numbers were at an all-time low in Namibia, with perhaps fewer than half a million animals surviving (Figure 1).

At that time wildlife was “owned” by the state. Land owners and custodians were expected to support the wildlife on their land, but they had no rights to use the wildlife and to derive any benefits from wildlife. In response to declining numbers and growing dissatisfaction from farmers, a new approach to wildlife management was introduced. In the 1960s and 1990s, conditional rights over the consumptive and non-consumptive use of wildlife were devolved to freehold and communal farmers respectively, the latter under Namibia’s well known conservancy programme. The laws give the same rights to farmers in both land tenure systems. This policy change led to a total change in attitude towards wildlife by land owners and custodians. Wildlife suddenly had value. It could be used to support a multi-faceted business model, including trophy hunting, meat production, live sale of surplus animals and tourism. It could be part of a conventional livestock farming operation, or be a dedicated business on its own. As the sector developed, so farmers discovered that they could do better from their wildlife than from domestic stock. Both small- and large-stock numbers declined on freehold farmland while wildlife numbers increased. Today there is more wildlife in Namibia than at any time in the past 150 years, with latest estimates putting the national wildlife herd at just over 3 million animals. And the reason is simple – wildlife is an economically more attractive, competitive form of land use than conventional farming in our arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid landscapes. Markets are driving more and more farmers towards the management of wildlife. This is good for conservation, not just from the perspective of wildlife, but also from the broader perspective of collateral habitat protection and biodiversity conservation. The greater the benefits that land owners and custodians derive from wildlife, the more secure it is as a land-use form and the more land there is under conservation management. Therefore, all the component uses of wildlife, including and especially trophy hunting, must be available to wildlife businesses. These uses include the full range of tourism options, live sale of surplus wildlife, and the various forms of consumptive use – trophy and venison hunting and wildlife harvesting for meat sale, value addition and own use. It is this combination of uses that makes wildlife outcompete conventional farming. And it is the “service” component of tourism and hunting that elevate wildlife values above that of primary production and the simple financial value of protein. As the impacts of climate change become ever more severe, so will primary production decline in value, but not so for the “service” values derived from arid-adapted wildlife. And why especially trophy hunting? Because there are large areas of Namibia comprising remote, flat terrain with monotonous vegetation that are unsuited to tourism, but very important for conservation.

If Namibia had adopted an animal-rights based, protectionist, anti-sustainable use approach to wildlife management, we would probably today have fewer than 250,000 head of wildlife (just 8% of our present wildlife herd) in a few isolated large parks and a few small private nature reserves. We would have lost the connectivity between land under wildlife, and we would have lost the collateral conservation benefits to broader biodiversity, natural habitats and ecosystem services. Today, Namibia has well over 50% of its land under some form of formally recognised wildlife management (but probably over 70% if informal wildlife management is considered), including one of the largest contiguous areas of land under conservation in the world – its entire coast, linking to Etosha National Park and to conservation areas in both South Africa (Richtersveld) and Angola (Iona National Park) – over 25 million ha (Figure 2).

There are some people in the tourism sector in Namibia and in our neighbouring countries who oppose trophy hunting because it is perceived to conflict with tourism and is thus not good for conservation. Some suggest that the land and its wildlife should be used for eco-tourism and not hunting. In most areas, eco-tourism cannot substitute for hunting. The loss of hunting revenue cannot be made up by eco-tourism revenue. Indeed, we need to optimise all streams of wildlife-derived revenue to make land under wildlife as competitive as possible.

Some tourism operators and tour guides attack the hunting sector to their guests. These tourism operators and guides are undermining an important part of conservation, an important contributor to making land under wildlife competitive and, in the final analysis, they are undermining the viability of conservation as a land-use form. The greatest threat to wildlife conservation, in Namibia and globally, is land transformation. Once land is transformed, often for agricultural purposes, it has lost its natural habitats, it has lost most of its biodiversity and it can no longer support wildlife. Hunters and tourism operators should and must be on the same side – to make land under wildlife more productive than under other forms of land use. They are natural allies. They need to work together to ensure that land under wildlife derives the greatest possible returns, through a multitude of income earning activities. And where it is necessary for both hunting and tourism to take place on the same piece of land, they need to plan, collaborate and communicate so that all aspects of wildlife management and utilization – both consumptive and non-consumptive – can take place without one impacting negatively on the other. Conflicts between hunting and tourism are simply failures of management and communication, nothing more profound than that. But the onus should be on the hunting outfitters to ensure that there are ongoing, good communications. The onus is also on hunting outfitters, professional hunters, and the hunting sector to always maintain the highest ethical and professional standards, and to be mindful of the sensitivities of many people to the issue of hunting.

It is also the vital task and duty of tourism operators and guides to educate visitors from the urban industrialised countries about conservation in this part of the world. Visitors need to understand what drives conservation, the role of incentives, markets and what is meant by sustainable wildlife management. The tourism sector should not skirt around an uncomfortable discussion on hunting, but face it head-on and explain its importance to conservation. This is what good education is all about. Tourists come to Namibia to be enlightened, to be exposed to new ideas and to better understand the issues in this part of the world. They come here to take back new and interesting stories. What better story than Namibia’s conservation successes. But visitors need to understand it properly – its incentives, its market alignment, its strong links to the local and national economy, and its role in addressing rural poverty. It is the task of the tourism industry to help visitors understand why Namibia has one of the most successful conservation track records of any country in the world.

If we look for a moment at the conservation trajectory of a country such as the United Kingdom (an urban industrialised example) through its agrarian and industrial development, the indigenous wildlife at that time had no value. Thus, it lost the elk, wild boar, bear, wolf, lynx, beaver and sea eagle – essentially its most charismatic and important species. While small-scale attempts to reintroduce a few of the less threatening species are underway, it is unlikely that it will ever reintroduce the bear and wolf into the wild as free-ranging populations. And yet that country and others like it, with poor historic conservation track records, are keen to influence how Namibia should manage its wildlife. Its own farmers are not prepared to live with wolves, but many of their politicians and conservation agencies, both public and non-governmental, expect Namibian farmers to live with elephant, hippo, buffalo, lion, leopard, hyaena, crocodile and many other wildlife species that are far more problematic from a human-wildlife conflict perspective than a wolf. And they try to remove the very tools available to conservation to keep these animals on the land – the tools of economics, markets and sustainable use, to create value for these animals within a well-regulated, sustainably management wildlife landscape.

I believe that the problem is essentially one of ignorance. People think that they are doing what is best for conservation, but they simply do not understand the economic drivers for wildlife and biodiversity conservation in biodiversity-rich and rainfall-poor developing countries. And many African countries are sadly falling into the same trap. Kenya, for example, with its Eurocentric protectionist conservation approaches, has less wildlife today than at any time in its history (Figure 3). We need to share the message. And the message is, I believe, most powerfully explained using the simple graphic in Figure 4.

The yellow line represents the return to land use under conventional farming, e.g. domestic stock and crops, across a rainfall gradient – rainfall being a proxy for land productivity. The green line shows the returns to land under wildlife. On the left side of the graph, in areas of rainfall below about 800 mm per year, returns from “indigenous production systems” – i.e. wildlife, are greater than the returns from “exotic production systems” – i.e. farming. However, this only applies if the rights to use wildlife are devolved to land owners and custodians. Markets then create a win-win situation for optimal returns from land and for wildlife conservation in these more arid areas. If utilisation rights are not devolved, then wildlife has little value to the land owner and custodian, and people will use the land for other activities. On the right side of the graph, above about 800 mm, the lines cross over and here conventional farming outperforms wildlife management. If land owners and custodians are given rights over the wildlife and other indigenous species on their land, they will get rid of these species and transform the land for farming in response to market forces. Most of the western, industrialised world falls into the right side of the graph. Conservation agencies and organisations from countries on the right side of the graph, and areas where rights over wildlife are not devolved to land owners, are so conditioned to resist and fight against market forces having negative conservation impacts in their countries, that they automatically carry the fight across to those countries falling into the left side of the graph and which have devolved wildlife rights, not realising that the lines have switched over and that markets here are working for conservation. This is the important message that we must get across to policy makers, conservation organisations and the broader public in the urbanised and industrialised countries. And in some other parts of Africa. People need to understand the conservation drivers, incentives and markets, as well as the role of sustainable use within good conservation policy and practice. Well-intentioned but poorly informed efforts to influence conservation in this region seriously undermine good conservation policies and practices.

A second insight from Figure 4 is that the greater the value earned from wildlife, not only is the gap widened on the left side of the graph over conventional farming, but the crossover point is pushed further to the right. This means that higher rainfall areas become competitive under wildlife management, opening more of Africa to this form of land use.

Namibia’s record of environmental accomplishment speaks for itself. Through the implementation of appropriate policies, it has created incentives for wildlife conservation, unmatched anywhere in the world. But wildlife must have value otherwise land owners and custodians will move to other forms of land use. And it must have the greatest possible value to be as secure a land use as possible, over the largest possible landscape. And that is why I strongly support well-managed and ethical hunting. It is good, and in some cases essential, for the conservation of wildlife, of habitats and of biological diversity. And that is why hunting and tourism must work together, in mutually supportive ways, to optimise returns from wildlife for the land. Well managed and ethical hunting should in fact be called “conservation hunting”. And conservation hunting is essentially an integral part of tourism.

April 2017

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