First, CAMPFIRE is earning cash for local people--around $2 million a year--through community-contracted safari hunts of elephants and other popular game animals. It's a pittance by American standards, but for rural peasants whose annual income amounts to a few hundred dollars, it's substantial. For example, the 149 heads of household who make up the village of Chikwarakwara met in the shade of a "meeting tree" to debate what to do with their CAMPFIRE wildlife revenue. After a long and considered discussion, they decided to divide the revenue--just under $100 per household--between community projects and individual household payments. Later, in a formal community ceremony, each household head publicly received his total wildlife dividend. Then each of them took turns depositing his agreed-upon share for community projects into two community pots, one designated for the local school and the other designated for a community grinding mill.
Second, CAMPFIRE communities are learning how to use the global market to their advantage. In 1991, the Chipinge district council had four elephants and several smaller animals to auction off to safari companies for trophy hunting. Lacking any prior experience in marketing, the district was able to sell the package for only $26,000. A year later, and a year wiser in the ways of the competitive market, it sold the same package for $68,515.
Third, CAMPFIRE is changing rural attitudes toward wildlife. In Hwange district, poaching stopped almost immediately after CAMPFIRE revenues were distributed to local residents. Elsewhere, poaching is declining. Before CAMPFIRE, about 50 bull elephants were hunted as trophies and 200 to 300 were shot annually to protect human lives and crops. Now that elephants have economic value to villagers, fewer than 30 are shot each year as problem animals; they are worth too much to be squandered for the sake of saving a hectare or two of maize. And although the killing of elephants in trophy hunting has almost doubled, the total elephant kill has fallen to 120. Fewer elephants now die at human hands, and those that do die enrich rather than impoverish the rural farmers who, with increasing enthusiasm, share the African landscape with mammals of sometimes Jurassic proportions. As a result, elephant numbers are on the increase in Southern Africa, soaring in Zimbabwe to 66,000 from 46,000 in the span of the CAMPFIRE years.
Other benefits can be traced to CAMPFIRE. Habits that indirectly harm wildlife--such as forest denudation, overgrazing by cattle, and human-set fires--are being battled by the same people who once practiced them. Now that wildlife has a high and marketable value, old practices are giving way to more profitable ones. In the community of Masoka, villagers are effecting a revolution in natural resource use and management. Prior to 1990, the resources of Masoka were open-access and heavily exploited. After 1990, Masoka village set up strict rules to govern resource use on its communal lands. Able at last to make wildlife pay, and pay more than cattle, the farmers of Masoka decided to remove their domestic stock and devote their labor to raising elephants and cape buffalo. In the words of one community member, "buffalo are our cattle."
CAMPFIRE has economic, social, and political flaws that even its staunchest advocates concede. Legal authority for community possession and exercise of wildlife rights is weak; by law, formal control of communal resources and derivative revenues lies in the hands of district councils--creations of the state, not of local villages. CAMPFIRE works best where those councils have voluntarily stepped aside in favor of democracy under a tree, letting villages reap the maximum benefits of wildlife use. Proponents of CAMPFIRE, such as Murphree and Child, understand this and are anxious to complete the full devolution of property rights from the state to self-governing village bodies. They know that the prospects for CAMPFIRE will be brighter as the state recedes and vanishes.
There are other problems. Lacking well-defined and fully enforceable communal property rights, many CAMPFIRE communities are plagued by newly arrived settlers who wish to share in the wealth of their common lands and the bounty of their communal revenues. Some communities have found ways around the deficiency of their rights, such as fencing their lands to stop the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease--a tactic that also effectively stops the invasion of squatters. Other communities are less fortunate and are still struggling with the open-access legacy of their communal lands. CAMPFIRE may unfairly raise hopes that wildlife revenues are an economic panacea. Some rural villages will benefit, but many will not; they lack the land base to sustain a wildlife industry. That is OK so long as the true beneficiaries of CAMPFIRE are kept in mind: the embattled wildlife of Southern Africa and the villagers won over to their conservation by the compelling incentive of hard cash. CAMPFIRE has yet to extend its program and its rights paradigm to other natural resources, such as caterpillars and termites (popular, protein-rich foods in rural villages), fish, firewood, and thatch and reed grasses (for roof and fence construction). Finally, the CAMPFIRE program has been heavily subsidized by foreign aid missions, including USAID. If the program is to be sustainable, it must stand on its own feet.
The evidence indicates that CAMPFIRE can be sustainable, especially if nations such as the United States refrain from using their domestic endangered species acts and the global Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora to block or impede the marketing of community-owned and harvested wildlife products. This may be easier said than done, however. In June at the CITES conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, the United States took the lead in opposing the limited resumption of the ivory trade in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Successful at first on an open ballot, the United States later failed on a second, secret ballot--a vote that was, to the relief of a majority of CITES's 136 member nations, beyond the pale of America's righteous and intimidating scrutiny.
Politics of bullying aside, the fact is Southern Africans made a better case. They pointed out in persuasive logic the opportunity costs to both humans and elephants should the ban be continued. Over a third of the 33 metric tons of stockpiled ivory in Zimbabwe, for example, is from communal areas, and sale of that ivory (not to mention elephant skins) could double village revenues, giving incentives to farmers to free up more communal land for habitat-challenged elephants and putting CAMPFIRE on more solid fiscal footing. They also reminded CITES delegates that elephants were thriving under their care; indeed, thriving so well that in Zimbabwe their numbers now exceed the land's carrying capacity by almost 50 percent. Having stewarded their elephants even to excess, Southern Africans argued that it would be wrong to further punish them with a CITES trade embargo for what, in effect, was the failure of other nations to protect their elephants through creative programs like CAMPFIRE.
Support for the Southern African position came from an unexpected quarter. TRAFFIC, a global environmental network that tracks unlawful trade in animal parts, had recently concluded in a report sponsored by the World Conservation Union, the Species Survival Commission, the World Wildlife Fund, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the CITES ban on ivory trade was not living up to expectations. The ivory trade had not stopped, and the rate of elephant poaching, after a brief fall in the early '90s, was now on the upswing. Moreover, the ban had done nothing to stem the greatest threat to elephants: the loss of habitat worldwide to a growing human population. In contrast, the one thing that had worked to stop poaching and the loss of habitat was the marketization of elephants through CAMPFIRE and related CBNRM programs. Nonetheless, animal rights groups, led by the Humane Society of the United States, are at this moment lobbying the U.S. government to use its Endangered Species Act and its clout as a CITES signatory to outlaw even trophy hunting of elephants. If that happens, elephants will bear the cost of renewed farmer hostility, and CAMPFIRE and other CBNRM efforts will wither and die, having lost their main source of natural resource revenues: Trophy hunting--the majority of it by U.S. citizens--accounts for 90 percent of CAMPFIRE income, and of that 64 percent comes from elephants.
Despite such internal and external threats, CAMPFIRE has ignited a movement that now encompasses all of Southern Africa. In Botswana, 150 controlled hunting areas have been carved out of the bush, and rights to wildlife resources have been granted to both commercial and community operators. One hunting area, bordering the Chobe National Park, is controlled by five villages that constitute the Chobe Enclave Conservation Trust. Its revenues from wildlife have risen from $12,000 in 1993 to $100,000 in 1996.
Zambia's CBNRM program, tagged ADMADE, has likewise followed the CAMPFIRE lead by vesting in both commercial and communal groups the right to harvest and benefit from wildlife in established game management areas. The Sandwe game management area, for example, was typical of many communal areas at the start of the program; wildlife was depleted and hunting companies were not interested in developing safari opportunities. Yet when the local community agreed to forgo poaching in exchange for marketable hunting rights, Sandwe's bleak picture brightened. Within four years trophy-quality animals had increased sufficiently to draw a paying safari operator, and by 1994 the community had earned its first check of $6,401.
My own interest in CBNRM lies in Malawi, at Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve. It is a small park, one that is eclipsed by the prestige of CAMPFIRE and overshadowed by the sheer bulk and diversity of wildlife in Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. Nonetheless, it is a special place because of what it could mean for the next step in community-based conservation.
Vwaza Marsh is a partial misnomer. Most of its land is well drained; only in the north are there extensive marsh lands, many of which dry up during the prolonged winter dry season. Vwaza Marsh is isolated. Its western border lies along the Zambian frontier, a zone of massive, unpopulated forest reserves maintained by the Zambian government. On the north, east, and south edges of Vwaza Marsh, about 6,000 farmers eke out a living growing maize and tobacco (thanks largely to USAID dollars that promote tobacco culture). Vwaza Marsh is not rich in wildlife; besides a handful of lions, zebras, kudu, hippos, and sable, its principal big game occupants are 300 elephants and a modest herd of cape buffalo.
The problem at Vwaza Marsh is that the people who live along its periphery are land starved and prudently terrified of elephants and buffalo. This has had two consequences. One, elephants and buffalo are being poached to extinction. Two, the people who live near Vwaza Marsh are petitioning the national government to open up its arable lands for single-family homesteads. Privatization of public resources is an attractive idea, but in the case of Vwaza Marsh it is neither ecologically prudent nor economically sound. Instead, a different and more promising solution is being advanced by a small band of community-based conservation enthusiasts, including me.
We want to save elephants and cape buffalo, and we hope to do so by creating use rights to Vwaza Marsh's modest bounty of natural resources and by allocating those rights to the villages nearest the reserve and most able to defend its land and wildlife. Our conservation scenario includes more than just elephants and buffalo (the only game in large enough numbers to be harvested); it also embraces medicinal plants, caterpillars, termites, fish, thatch and reed grasses, and a litany of minor resources. As with CAMPFIRE, we want small clusters of villages to take possession of those rights, distribute them among households--the basic unit of rural African life--and reap the benefits that come with the use and conservation of owned resources.
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