Wild Success

Saving endangered wildlife once meant trampled crops and violent death to the villagers of Southern Africa. Now community-based capitalism is turning once-fearsome pests into valuable sources of wealth.

Karl Hess Jr. from the October 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Wildlife was the clear winner. By 1990, 75 percent of all Zimbabwean ranchers in areas too dry to support crop production had shifted partly or entirely to wildlife ranching--an easy economic decision, given the near quadruple net profit per acre advantage held by wildlife over cattle. Groups of ranchers combined to form "conservancies" of five to 25 properties, each with common rules and objectives, and each with sufficient land base to reintroduce far-roaming yet economically valuable species such as elephant and cape buffalo.

Over the years the benefits of private ownership and cooperative conservancies have accrued to a range of endangered species. Liberal game ranching laws now accommodate the lucrative business of crocodile farming. Crocodile eggs are collected in the wild, and the hatchlings are raised for domestic slaughter. A significant percentage, though, are returned to the wild to seed new populations. Once on the edge of extinction, crocodiles are now thriving in areas of Southern Africa where their commercial exploitation is allowed.

The benefits of private enterprise have also spilled over to nonfarmed wildlife. Black and white rhinos, for example, are flourishing on private ranches, and elephants are making dramatic comebacks. More telling still is the tale and status of leopards and cheetahs, species long viewed and treated as vermin by ranchers fearful for the well-being of their livestock. In Zimbabwe, leopards were removed from protected status, endowing them with high market value as trophies and pelts. Now that leopards are money-making assets, their numbers are on the upswing, and the use of dogs or traps to gratuitously kill them is blocked by social sanction and the economic incentive to sustain a flourishing population for lucrative hunts. In contrast, cheetahs, which were less numerous than leopards, were kept in protected status, suppressing whatever commercial value they might have had. They remain, for that reason, imperiled; they are, in ranchers' eyes, vermin with no redeeming value.

Although private solutions to wildlife conservation have had dramatic results, their promise and application in post-colonial Southern Africa is limited by the political power and cultural dominance of communal lands. First, communal lands are the enduring legacy of traditional tribal land tenure; the overwhelming majority of black Africans live and farm on them, and the prospect of changing that reality is slim. Second, communal lands were excluded from the wildlife reforms granted to the private sector; such lands remained open-access commons under state dominion, subject to the full gamut of national laws that have made wildlife more a burden than a benefit to rural Africans. Third, communal lands are generally the most marginal and least productive lands for agriculture and, for that reason, among the most important lands for wildlife. Fourth, communal lands frequently surround park lands and protected areas; together, the two land systems form vital ecological units in which much of the biological richness and diversity of Southern Africa resides.

African conservationists harbor no illusions about private lands. They have understood all along that saving the region's wildlife could not be done on private lands alone; communal lands would have to be included in the strategy--a strategy that, for both cultural and political reasons, could not entail broad-based privatization. Moreover, they have known that any strategy to conserve wildlife on communal lands would have to have a compelling and enticing economic component. Unless conservation could be linked to economic development, it would have no more value to peasant farmers than a marauding elephant declared off-limits by the state.

The problem they faced was complex: How could nonsustainable open access to wildlife be curtailed and individual incentives for wildlife conservation be created while communal ownership of land and communal harvest of wildlife was promoted and encouraged? One answer, advanced by Garret Hardin in his seminal essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," is that the problem as stated is unsolvable: Individuals tend to consume as much of the common resource as possible, without preserving it for future use, because they get all the benefits and bear only some of the costs. Over time, this incentive to overconsume leads to permanently depleting land or killing off wildlife.

By all appearances, those conditions held sway on the communal lands of Southern Africa. Harvest of key game species, from elephants to rhinos to buffalo, exceeded birth rates, and the benefits of slaughtering them made the prospect of their impending demise, and the bonanza of their free meat, skins, horns, and ivory, net gains for a rural people plagued by the ever-present reality of hunger, disease, and death. Yet appearances can be deceiving, for what made the "wildlife commons" tragic was not its lot as common property but rather its open-access status, created by the state's usurpation of village rights to wildlife and its eclipse of tribal institutions that had once governed the harvest of big game. That this would happen is partially explained in the writings of F. Berkes, Daniel Bromley, and Elinor Ostrom--scholars who have seen that communal institutions can govern common property resources, but only if their power to do so is not corrupted by state intrusion. Southern Africans took this lesson to heart, and in the wildlands of Zimbabwe the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) was born in 1986.

CAMPFIRE, a program of the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife, was designed to improve wildlife conservation on communal lands much the same way wildlife conservation had been improved a decade earlier on private lands by private ownership of wildlife. Its goal was to allocate the rights to use communal resources (especially big game) to small rural communities, which could then sell those rights, mainly in the form of licenses for trophy hunts. The revenue earned--several thousand dollars for a buffalo and many times more for an elephant--would, supporters theorized, give villagers money for local development and strong incentives to protect elephants and other money-earning wildlife. Supporting this presumption was a simple economic reality: Wildlife marketed as intact trophies was many times more valuable than wildlife poached for subsistence meat or divided up for black-market sale.

Communal lands, however, presented a problem; the law did not allow for the transfer of wildlife use rights to villages. As a compromise, the Department of National Parks and Wildlife delegated the appropriate authority to district councils, the legal representatives of CAMPFIRE-participating villages. Though not a perfect solution, district councils generally have given villages autonomy in the running of local wildlife enterprises and in the control of most revenues raised from safari hunting.

Today, CAMPFIRE is more a movement of participating villages, district councils, and collaborating organizations (World Wildlife Fund, the Center for Applied Social Sciences, African Resources Trust, and Zimbabwe Trust) than it is a government monopoly. It is pragmatic rather than ideological, blazing a trail with whatever help it can get, including some $20 million in foreign aid from the United States (all of which has gone to the infrastructure of CAMPFIRE; village revenue comes exclusively from wildlife hunts). As mixed and imperfect as CAMPFIRE is--at least relative to its vision of full village governance of communal wildlife and revenues--it is a seminal movement.

Its significance is suggested by the friends and foes it has attracted. CAMPFIRE's supporters span the gamut of left and right, from the 39-member Congressional Black Caucus to the World Wildlife Fund to an array of libertarian think tanks to the World Conservation Union to the pragmatically Marxist Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe. Its opponents, in contrast, are more narrowly ideological and more inclined to a fervent and unflinching animal rights world view. They include the political and the nonpolitical: passionate legislators, such as Reps. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), and the even more impassioned Humane Society of the United States.

Those closest to the CAMPFIRE movement describe it in paradoxical terms. Marshall Murphree, former director of the Center for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, likens the movement to a "khaki shorts ecology brigade" out to save wildlife but inadvertently thrust to the forefront of a "struggle [to save] property rights in rural Africa"--a crusade that he believes has sweeping implications for land and resource reform, local self-governance, and conservation policy throughout Southern Africa. Such views are common among CAMPFIRE activists, who see themselves as a revolutionary breed apart from the run-of-the-mill conservationist.

Brian Child, a former Zimbabwe National Parks scientist, celebrates CAMPFIRE as the offspring of the Western private property rights tradition and the Southern African tradition of small, self-governing communities. It is, he writes, "like the communist system in that it is based on community rather than private ownership, but resembles the capitalist system in that it uses the market to allocate resources."

CAMPFIRE's melding of wildlife property rights with the rule of autonomous, small-scale communities explains its broad ideological appeal to libertarians, conservation biologists, and leftists--and, in turn, its rejection by animal rightists and statist U.S. politicians. In essence, what proponents of CAMPFIRE admire most about it is its fair and common-sense conservation ethic: Those who bear the costs of conservation should also reap its benefits. Applied to rural, African communal lands, CAMPFIRE and its community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) cousins in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia stand for the same wildlife reform principles applied earlier to white landowners, but now adapted to the culture and custom of the peasant farmer.

The goals of CAMPFIRE and CBNRM are simple: to secure community claims to wildlife and to engage local villagers in the sustainable harvest and economical marketing of wildlife products (primarily hunts)--to benefit, in a word, the very people who must pay, on a daily basis, the conservation price of putting up with less-than-benign wild neighbors. The programs work by devolving property rights in wildlife from the state to the lowest possible level, by making clusters of villages the focal point of communal self-governance and by making the body of villagers who can comfortably assemble in the shade of a meeting tree the arbiters of democracy and the marketers of safaris. So far, the results--especially those from CAMPFIRE--suggest a degree of success comparable to that attained earlier on private lands in Namibia and Zimbabwe.