Safari Hunting and Conservation on Communal Land

25 November 2002

1)Dale Lewis, Wildlife Conservation Society

2)John Jackson, World Conservation Force

Abstract

This paper highlights key lessons derived from extensive experience in testing ways to make safari hunting more accountable to wildlife conservation on communal or customary land. It offers these lessons as a framework for developing the needed policies, management criteria and partnerships for sustaining benefits from tourist hunting, both for national and rural economies. It also draws extensively from experience in Southern Africa and suggests that when such lessons are applied, communities will contribute to increased wildlife production. This positive relationship to conservation can sustain revenue levels that can give wildlife a competitive advantage to most other land uses.

A major policy need for achieving these results is to create incentives for stakeholder partnerships to reduce threats that contribute to wildlife mortality or loss of wildlife habitat. Household livelihood needs, especially hunger and low income, are important contributing factors to such threats on communal lands. National Governments have the key role in helping design stakeholder partnership agreements that can reduce these threats through fair trade practices that link economic benefits to rural livelihood improvements. Practical illustrations provide compelling reasons why the safari hunting industry should invest in this livelihood approach as a basis for increasing wildlife production. Political commitment to policies that promote such investments and stakeholder partnerships remain a major constraint to realizing the full value of safari hunting for wildlife conservation.

International marketing conventions drive a major share of safari hunts sold world-wide. These conventions could influence policy development in support of conservation by requiring minimum compliance to policy standards for nation states sending trade delegations to market their hunts. Verifying compliance will require closer cooperation between conservation groups and hunting organizations in the monitoring of safari hunting policies and practices world-wide.

Safari Hunting and Conservation on Communal Land

Safari hunting, often called tourist hunting, is a form of land use that is capable of generating exceedingly high market value for wildlife resources. Well-established marketing conventions and trade practices exist world-wide for marketing hunts to maximize the economic value of wildlife and to satisfy tourist hunting demand for hunting adventures and trophy quality animals. Revenues from these sales account for over $500,000,000 annually world-wide, and in South Africa alone, annual revenues exceed $50,000,000 (Van der Walt 2002). The direct revenue to the Government of Tanzania from safari hunting exceeds $10,000,000 annually (Emmanuel Severre, pers. com.).

On private land, where such incentives for investing in wildlife production is a simple profit-driven decision for the land owner, tourist hunting has become a major factor for wildlife recovery and re-introduction in many parts of the world. Examples of these successes are in the tens of thousands, and on private land tourist hunting has unequivocally proven an important economic engine for conservation. In South Africa, for example, over 9000 private game ranches occupy 10,364,104 ha. (Bothma 2002) and have contributed to the recovery of blesbok, white rhinoceros, black wildebeest and the Cape mountain zebra (Flack 2002). Today, South Africa has more wildlife than it has had in the past 100 years (Bothma 2002). It is estimated that game ranches in South Africa contain 1.7 million large mammals on 13.3% of the land formerly designated for agriculture but subsequently converted to private game ranches (Eloff 2002). Gross annual income from these ranches exceeds $84 million with major income sources derived from tourist hunting, biltong and live animal sales (Bothma 2002).

In contrast, the economics of sustaining wildlife production from tourist hunting on communal or customary land, especially in less developed parts of the world, face a number of constraints, some of which can greatly influence the marketability of a hunting area and the conservation benefits of tourist hunting. For example, low income communities who cohabit their land with wildlife often face livelihood needs that increase the costs of living with wildlife and lower household support for wildlife production. Habitat destruction and wildlife poaching are common manifestations of this problem. Households also contend with opportunity costs for pursuing alternative uses of the land. Such decisions are weighed against not only the possible incentives for producing wildlife but also the tenure and resource rights that ensure these incentives are guaranteed (Tietenberg 1996, Freese 1996). Otherwise, households are apt to pursue agricultural or livestock-based land uses through more reliable local markets but often at irreversible costs to wildlife habitats. This is where private game ranches have a distinct advantage because laws generally support the rights of private land owners to produce and market wildlife without external interference (Freese 1998). Under private ownership, conversion of private farmland to game ranching adds approximately 500,000 ha per year to wildlife production in South Africa (Flack 2002), and on average wildlife revenues, due largely to a wider diversity of marketable products, exceeds livestock revenues by over 50% (Bothma, 2002).

In many cases, such as Zambia, Tanzania and Botswana, wildlife is State-owned and tourist hunting on customary land is controlled by a government management authority. Under these arrangements, the hunting industry typically depends on a number of stakeholders who compete for the same pot of safari revenues. This tends to increase the complexity for sharing and co-managing hunting profits to reduce local threats to wildlife (Gujadhur 2001) and increases the risks of unfair trade deals that marginalize the community as a primary

stakeholder and wildlife producer for the industry. As a result, the community becomes less of a resource owner and more of a landlord able to receive only fixed "rent" fees from commercial parties, who exploit, administer and largely control wildlife markets. Such ambiguity of ownership and incentives for producing wildlife hinder the full merits of tourist hunting as a tool for conservation and rural development (Honey, 1999). Finally, rural communities on whose land tourist hunting is practiced usually have the least knowledge about tourist hunting among the stakeholders. Such disparity lowers community interest to become more actively engaged with the private sector as a cooperating partner and also limits their ability to seek more equitable terms of commercial partnerships (Freese 1998).

In recent years, tourist hunting advocates and wildlife conservationists have sought increased collaboration with Government authorities to make tourist hunting more responsive to these constraints. Much of this joint-effort was pioneered through community-based programs that enhanced community involvement in wildlife conservation through economic incentives and joint-enterprise development from tourist hunting. Key examples of these programs were CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe, ADMADE in Zambia and the Chobe Enclave Conservation Trust in Botswana. A number of hunter-based organizations also initiated efforts to promote social and economic benefits from safari hunting on communal hunting areas. One such example is the Cullman and Hurt Community Wildlife Project in Tanzania (Honey 1999), which constructed schools, medical dispensaries, mobile medical truck, and full-time anti-poaching patrols from an added conservation donation asked of each tourist hunter. All these initiatives had expectations of conserving wildlife on large, semi-wild rural landscapes, many of which buffered wildlife protected areas. With over a decade to test and refine their respective approaches, there now exists a much better understanding of how to link tourist hunting to wildlife conservation on customary land.

These lessons are grouped into two broad categories. One pertains to the policies and procedures that regulate tourist hunting, both as an industry and as a form of land use. The other pertains to strategies of investing safari revenues in wildlife production on communal land. Both sets of experiences reveal the need to make safari hunting accountable and responsive to rural development and in particular, household livelihood needs. Otherwise, rural communities will be less willing to either bear the costs of living with large mammals or contribute to the production of trophy animals for tourist hunting. Studies clearly show the link between livelihood needs and threats to wildlife and other natural resources (Lewis 2001, Lewis and Tembo 2000, Lonergan 1993), and unless this relationship is interpreted and applied as a basis for designing wildlife enterprises on communal land, laws legislated for the protection of wildlife may not necessarily guarantee wildlife's future on rural landscapes.

This paper highlights the key lessons from both categories and offers them as a framework for developing the needed policies, management criteria and partnerships for sustaining benefits from tourist hunting, both for national and rural economies. It also draws extensively from experiences in Southern Africa and suggests that when such lessons are applied, communities will contribute to increased wildlife production. In some cases the underlying conditions needed to implement these lessons are jeopardized by corruption and political interference, which can undermine programs designed to link tourist hunting to community-led approaches to conservation. Despite this threat, tourist hunting offers enormous potential for driving conservation solutions and provides a rich set of experiences to help guide policies and programs that can help tie tourism to conservation and rural development.

Policies and regulations: pre-requisites for achieving conservation

Governments play a key role in helping define how resource use beneficiaries and producers cooperate to achieve conservation results and derive increased commercial benefits. A set of strategic guidelines and procedures for enhancing policy support of this role are presented below:

1. Primary requirements of tourist hunting policies that support conservation

Modalities for conducting safari hunts are reflected in such policy instruments as concession and leasing agreements, procedures for awarding concessions, stakeholder role in allocating and marketing hunting quotas, licensing controls, and fee structures. All are fundamental to ensuring the industry is competitive and profitable. Without the technical capacity and the political will by Government to develop, monitor and enforce these instruments through legally binding agreements with the stakeholders, attempts to resolve wildlife/human conflicts and achieve conservation results through safari hunting will likely fail. Experience shows, however, this condition is not easily met and can expose local communities to increased uncertainties and risks by committing their land to wildlife production.

Zambia, for example, suffered from a two-year ban on safari hunting due to a range of problems related to ambiguous procedures for renewing concession agreements as well as weak controls for regulating hunting quotas and issuing animal licenses. Despite an annual injection of about $800,000 into rural development needs from safari revenues, local authorities were not consulted when the ban was imposed. Without alternative revenues to sustain community participation in wildlife conservation, wildlife numbers suffered serious losses (unpublished aerial surveys, Zambia Wildlife Authority) and consumer confidence in Zambia as a safari hunting destination declined sharply (Causey 2001). In Tanzania, approved procedures for awarding hunting highly favored concessions were thwarted to favor Arab hunting interests by senior Government officials. As a result of severe over-hunting in these concessions, wildlife stocks for a number of species became depleted (Honey 1999). In Botswana a key economic species, lion, was removed from the safari hunting quota for reasons attributed mostly to non-hunting sentiments rather than technical merits (Jackson 2002). This severely reduced the country's competitiveness as a hunting destination, denied needed income for rural communities, and removed any economic justification for protecting lions when conflicts with cattle or local residents occurred.Economic incentives, which are vital to any policy framework that promotes wildlife conservation through safari hunting, depends on a stable policy environment that encourages stakeholders, especially the community producer, to invest in wildlife production as a basis for sustaining trophy animals. In particular, economic incentives can provide a highly effective tool for controlling or even eliminating threats that limit wildlife production. Using incentives in this way requires accountable local institutions capable of targeting the very people who contribute to these conflicts with incentives designed to minimize their occurrence. This adds another important level of complexity to policy development due to the cross-cultural and inter-institutional relationships needed to drive this approach. Strategic policy interventions that can promote its success include:? By-laws or constitutions that mandate elected community leaders and traditional leaders on ways and procedures for using safari hunting revenues to mitigate those conflicts that pose the greatest threats to wildlife production,?? ? ?Open and transparent procedures for remitting revenue shares to community accounts in ways that enhance local knowledge that wildlife production is a profitable form of land use, and

?? ? ?External controls that prevent financial mismanagement by community leaders or non-compliance by the private sector to agreements with the community.

Instituting such policies assumes such institutions exist and have the capacity to enforce their compliance. With over 15 years of national programs supporting these institutions in Southern Africa with over $60 million of donor assistance, experience reveals how slow and difficult the process is. The alternative is costly enforcement of regulations and laws that often increases local resistance to conservation (Lewis 1999, Lewis et. al., 2001a).

Despite legislative support for such incentives throughout much of Southern Africa, reliable and transparent procedures for returning safari revenues from Government to local communities are often weak. In past years revenue disbursements in Zambia followed a bureaucratic and time-consuming process, which contributed to delays and unnecessary suspicions that jeopardized community cooperation with the safari hunting industry (Lewis 1999). Community authorities sought policy approval for a direct payment of community shares into individual community accounts through the national licensing office. The controlling institution, however, remained protective of its role to control revenues with promises of improving disbursement schedules. This did not happen and the communities became further alienated from their legitimate role as a key stakeholder in the industry. Botswana and Namibia have addressed this problem by ensuring transactions of wildlife sales takes place within the community with direct payments to community institutions through their representative leaders. In such cases communities are empowered to sell hunting quotas and witness the full economic value of wildlife through public auctions or tendors (Gujadhur 2001).

Safari hunting policies that promote sustained increases in profitability and offer community incentives to produce wildlife are necessary but not sufficient to resolve the full range of conflicts that threaten wildlife on rural landscapes. A key policy need for filling this gap is making safari hunting and the revenues it generates responsive to those household livelihood needs that contribute to wildlife conflicts the most. A growing body of experience suggests that lack of household livelihood security is a primary cause to both illegal degradation of wildlife and high rates of wildlife habitat loss (Lewis 2001, Lewis and Tembo 1999, van der Jagt, et. al., 2000). Addressing household livelihoods requires formal agreements and modalities by stakeholders and a clear commitment by local leaders to link wildlife production with improved household livelihoods.

The Zambia Wildlife Authority, for example, has a policy of co-management agreements in its Wildlife Act (1998). These help define obligatory responsibilities by itself and community authorities for co-managing wildlife and benefiting from its use. Such agreements could also serve as an effective legal instrument for requiring community institutions to support household livelihood needs as a condition for receiving safari hunting revenues. Murphree (1993) argues against passively earned benefits as opposed to linking benefits with the level of effort a community makes in earning benefits from wildlife. Policies in the USA, for example, work to increase wildlife producers compliance to management conditions that promote wildlife production and in exchange land owners are allowed to market their animals for fee hunts (Rasker and Freese 1995).

Ensuring wildlife revenues reach target groups in ways that promote wildlife production is commonly recognized as a problem for most CBNRM programs in Southern Africa. In

Botswana, for example, dominance by community power elites and low levels of education to invest funds properly pose a threat to household-level benefits (van der Jagt, et. al., 2000) and in Zimbabwe the local council authority restrict the flow of revenue shares to village communities (Freese 1998).

2. Potential for corruption

Where the above mentioned policy requirements are lacking or their enforcement is inadequate, interference by vested interests who seek a preferential share of tourist hunting profits can become a serious constraint to the industry's contribution to conservation. This is especially true in countries with weak management institutions unable to control such manipulation or corruption of the industry. In such cases, the community often becomes marginalized and reluctant to control land uses that conflict with wildlife production. The tourist hunter, who may think his hunting fees are contributing to conservation, instead becomes an unwitting contributor to a potentially corrupt industry that siphons an unfair share of these revenues into private accounts, leaving the local community unrewarded for its efforts to produce wildlife.

Protecting the community from such abuse and promoting their rights as wildlife producers depends very much on Government to allow communities to establish themselves as civil society groups with full legal rights to sue authorities against such wrongs. The possibility of transgressions on a weaker partner in a commercial partnership makes such legal protection an important way to uphold fair and respectful relations among cooperating partners. Zambia has instituted policies to help achieve this balance by creating Community Resource Boards as local wildlife management authorities to co-manage wildlife as a legal entity and partner with both Government and the private sector. As such, these Boards are a required signatory to all safari hunting lease agreements, and as such, have certain legal rights to exercise their views on the selection of lease holders for hunting concessions.

Though in existence for only a few years, these Boards have already exercised their powers by seeking court interventions on several issues, including payments of unpaid safari revenue shares and rejection of selection procedures of safari concession holders. In this context they represent a potential challenge to Government authority over wildlife assets in the country, but in other ways they represent a key opportunity for making safari hunting more accountable to the community producer and thus to wildlife conservation.

Without such a balance, a more centralized control of the industry by government can lead to private sector manipulation of lease agreements and the lease-holder selection process. This promotes an environment for corruption and government interference in the hunting industry, all of which contributes to serious consequences for wildlife conservation:

?? ? ?Corruption costs for securing a hunting area reduces the amount the private sector might otherwise invest in wildlife production.

?? ? ?Merits of past performance, experience and commitment to conservation have less importance as criteria for selecting lease holders

?? ? ?Increased presence of inexperienced lease holder increases risks of sub?contracting to experienced operators, which reduces investments in wildlife production.

3. Defining Government's role

Providing the right policy environment for safari hunting to prosper and support conservation goals requires a clear role for Government's own involvement in the industry. A direct role in owning and operating hunting concessions by Government authorities has produced a dismal track record in Southern Africa. Self-serving interests tend to manipulate and undermine management controls of hunting quotas, pricing structures, and private sector regulations (Honey 1999). As Government institutions desire devolution of management authority to local land owners and producers of wildlife, their role in building stakeholder commitment to resource management and commercial success becomes increasingly important. There are four important reasons for this, all of which are closely inter-linked and promote a strong rationale for Governments to institute policies that build stakeholder partnerships:

?? ? ?By increasing local stakeholder responsibility for the conservation and management of wildlife, the financial burden by Government authorities to pay wildlife management costs diminishes. This reduces the need for Government to place a heavy tax burden on safari revenues to meet these costs themselves. As a result, the level of financial resources available for investment in wildlife production increases.

?? ? ?Local solutions to conserving wildlife are usually less expensive and more cost effective (Lewis 1999).

?? ? Without the right conservation approach on communal lands, there will be a diminishing supply of trophy animals to market.

?? ? ?The core business of Government, through its wildlife management authority, is wildlife conservation, not profit.

Interventions by Government should therefore be carefully designed to motivate stakeholders to produce wildlife and increase partnerships that lead to increased cooperation for producing competitive tourist hunting products that ultimately support conservation. In the United States, for example, the Federal Duck Stamp Program generates $22 million annually from duck hunters for the purchase and protection of wetlands (Burnett 2002). Similar programs financed by hunters support mountain sheep and elk conservation.

A key basis for achieving successful interventions is to relate their effects on wildlife production, revenues, and client satisfaction with products sold. This requires a key Government role in monitoring and analyzing these relationships and providing a direct feedback of results to the stakeholders and to continued policy development or refinement.

Ensuring interventions and policy guidelines are followed has proven difficult in many rural areas of Southern Africa where tourist hunting is allowed. Though the level of supervision by Government may be logistically difficult, failure to do so increases the risks of distrust among cooperating partners (van der Jagt, et. al., 2000) and lowers the level of stakeholder commitment to key obligations for enhancing partnerships. Experience from implementing the ADMADE program in Zambia illustrate key areas of supervision that require an active role by Government (Lewis 1999):

?? ? ?Community leadership audits to assess use of community revenue shares and processes used to identify uses of these funds for livelihood support and wildlife threat reduction

?? ? ?Community management audits to assess performance indicators, such as law enforcement patrol effort, community compliance to land use plans, data management and investments in resource management

? Private sector audits to ensure compliance to agreed conditions in lease agreement and level of cooperation with community leaders.

If performance targets as based on these audits are below expectations, Government has the additional responsibility to intervene, such as facilitating stakeholder dialogue to resolve possible disputes or skills training of community members to improve their functions as leaders, accountants or resource managers. When performance scores show exemplary success, recognition is warranted. To encourage high scores, Government could award an increased percentage of revenue shares to the community or improved terms of lease security for the concessions holder. In Zambia such scoring was used to recognize safari operators with the Conservation Bullet Award for compliance to both resource management and community partnership criteria (Lewis 1998).

4. Different user-right models for benefiting from tourist hunting

Numerous cases exist where communal authorities operate their own safari hunting company with partners they choose themselves. Most of these cases are in North America where ownership of wildlife is invested in Native American societies living on reservations. White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, USA and the Inuit Hunting Councils in Nunavut, NW Territory, Canada are examples of indigenous communities having total ownership of their tourist hunting enterprise. Both offer some of the most expensive tourist hunts on the market due largely to a highly successful program of resource protection and management. A single elk hunt on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, guided by Native Americans from the reservation, can sell for as high as $16,000 for a single elk hunt. A polar bear hunt in Nunavut generates $24,000 for the Inuit Council.

Key to this success is community-wide commitment to maintaining land in a semi-wild state, ownership rights of wildlife, and business partners who provided critical support services to helping launch their hunting tourism. As part of their contracted services, these partners also transferred needed skills in marketing, wildlife management, camp management and client guiding. Today these reservations operate a profitable tourism industry with a high degree of self-reliance and independence.

The community-ownership model described above requires full wildlife ownership rights of the resource. For most customary land owners in Southern Africa, Governments allow user rights and not ownership rights. Despite its limitations as compared to the increased security of ownership afforded to private game ranches, there is a trend throughout much of the region promoting user rights through various joint-venture models. Such models take advantage of the marketing skills of the private sector but gives key powers to community authorities through stipulated user rights of the resource. In Botswana, for example, the community has the right to sell their quotas to both safari clients and to local citizens according to a required minimum allocation level for both category. Any balance of animals may be allocated and sold in the way the community chooses. If the community wishes, they may also lease their land to an operator at full market value, based on a tender or auction system. The exact details of quota allocation and mutual obligations contained in the lease agreement constitute the backbone of the joint-venture agreement.

Joint-venture agreements are viable policy instruments for building community private sector relationships for increasing local commitment to wildlife production. Much of this potential is in the details of the agreement itself. Facilitating such agreements often requires a neutral facilitator to ensure any disparity of knowledge or understanding is not exploited during the

negotiation process. Another approach is to link the duration of a hunting concession to a process that initially limits the duration but provides a graduated extension of the concession based on measured improvements in the joint-venture agreement and its compliance.

5.? ?Policy compliance: the role of international agreements and marketing conventions

Except for trade laws protecting selected species, such as CITES, Endangered Species Act and E.U. Regulations) and conventions to enhance Government commitment to sustainable use of biodiversity (Convention on Biological Diversity 1994), international agreements that set standards for tourist hunting to support conservation are non-existent. Given the potential for its abuse on communal land, there is clear justification for hunting and conservation advocates to seek such standards, especially since rural communities generally lack the capital or know-how to run a safari hunting concession or to effectively secure their needs from the industry. A number of individual hunting organizations prescribe ethical approaches to hunting by their own members, but in general these pertain to aspects of fair hunting or standards of services required by hunting operators.

Though not all hunters may qualify as conservationists, hunters do pay the bill, and a hunter who is a conservationist expects his bill to include a direct and meaningful contribution to conservation. Large and influential hunting organizations like Safari Club International have the capacity to lobby for improved policies to strengthen conservation results and to leverage for their increased enforcement in countries where their members constitute a major part of the safari hunting clientele. Through its annual marketing convention, for example, Safari Club International helps sell many thousands of hunts annually to hunting destinations all around the globe. Because of their strategic importance to the success and characteristics of global tourist hunting products, these marketing conventions could apply economic pressure for international compliance to conservation standards by requiring verifiable proof before accepting marketing agents from a country under review. Such pressure could operate at the national level or at the individual operator level. Alternatively, a certification based on different grades of compliance could be the basis for discerning safari clients to select operators or country destinations that support conservation. Although certification proposals based on a "green marketing" concept have been proposed (Lewis and Alpert 1997), the tourist hunting industry to date has not undertaken any adoption of such ideas. The International Council of Game and Wildlife Management (CIC) has such a proposal under review at this time.

6.? ?Policies that promote local participation and knowledge in the industry

Community authorities have historically played a negligible role in managing a hunting concession. In general, the local perception is that safari operators and their professional hunting guides, who are normally expatriate or non-resident employees of safari operators, are the primary if not exclusive sources of expertise for running a safari hunting business. This perception is maintained by policies that do not encourage or reward co-management partnerships or joint venture agreements with the community. For the most part, the operator is a business person who resides far from the hunting area while the professional hunter resides only seasonally in the hunting area and usually lacks the authority, budget control or the time to facilitate co-management activities with the community.

Such inherent barriers to a co-management relationship furthers and encourages cultural barriers between a safari operator and the community landlord of the hunting area. In various ways this can acerbate threats to wildlife in a hunting area. For example, throughout much of Southern Africa, there is a strong cultural tradition for hunting. Local hunters, who are usually

respected and knowledgeable people in the community, are normally regarded by the safari operator as poachers and in conflict with their own interest in running a safari hunting business. This perception is reinforced by wildlife laws that often require local hunters to buy licenses they cannot afford and indeed they often do become poachers. Ironically, local hunters have some of the same interests and skills as most professional hunting guides, but are ostracized as poachers or law-breakers and thus excluded from the industry. Such alienation denies the industry a potentially constructive and valued asset to the safari operator. One basic starting point for remedying this problem is for the safari operator to identify and employ the top local hunters as trackers, skinners and assistants to the professional hunting guide. Smart safari operators have long done this, but not systematically or programmatically. A more long-term approach is to ensure local residents can achieve more senior positions in a safari operation, including hunting guides.

A critical wedge that can widen this cultural divide are conflicting policies that undermine private sector interest in joint-venture relationships with the community. A good example are policies that allow non-safari hunts at low, subsidized values on the same land allocated to tourist hunting. As a result, the same animals marketed to international tourist hunters at full market value are sold at greatly reduced prices to the local market. Where such overlap limits quotas for selected species important to the industry or contributes to hunting disturbances that lower the hunting area's marketability, industry profits suffer and revenue incentives for the community producer declines. Not only are these local hunts difficult to control and regulate, but they also discourage community involvement and private sector investments in wildlife production (Lewis 1999).

Botswana provides a policy solution to this problem through the range of user rights afforded to community authorities (van der Jagt, et. al., 2000). In the Botswana case, local authorities enforce local guidelines for controlling the adverse effects of low cost hunts on their land. Examples include type and number of vehicle allowed per licensed hunter, number of passengers, when the hunt is allowed and duration, where the hunting may take place, conditions for monitoring the hunt and so forth. Through such controls as asserted by community preference for safari revenues, joint-venture agreements become an important basis for the safari operator to protects its own investments and strengthen its partnership with the local community. As a result, there is a high degree of private sector commitment in Botswana to help train community members in skills needed to occupy senior positions in the hunting enterprise (van der Jagt, et. al., 2000).

Where such guidelines exist to protect communities from unfair trade practices, the industry tends to select for operators who are committed to joint-venture partnerships. This leads to community private sector relationships that promote community understanding of wildlife's economic value through community participation in legal markets. Otherwise, unscrupulous investors are more apt to take advantage of traditional communities and their leaders by securing ownership of land parcels through ill-gotten means. This often increases livelihood threats by denying communities future access to wildlife markets and erodes community commitment to wildlife as a viable land use.

7. Reducing threats to key economic species of conservation importance

Use of wire snares to kill wild animals is a common way farmers in many rural areas of Africa compensate for failed grain crops by exchanging game meat for carbohydrates. Snaring is an especially destructive form of poaching because it is indiscriminate and wasteful. For example, when a potential prey animal is snared, predators such as the large cats or wild

dogs are attracted and are often snared themselves since multiple snares are normally set in the same area. In recent years, safari hunting clients frequently complained of lion trophies with deep cuts and injuries caused by snares. At one safari camp, out of a total of five lions hunted, three had snare injuries (Lewis and Tembo 2000), suggesting how serious snaring is as a source of mortality.

Large mammals, such as hippos and elephants, contribute to widespread crop damage. Hippos graze extensively on early maize and rice crops, as well as ground nuts. In addition to crop damage, elephants also destroy village granaries and cause serious loss of food security for individual households. Farmers who suffer from these losses are generally more receptive to cooperate with commercial poachers who visit from outside the area and target such species as elephants and hippos.

Without some form of economic compensation and incentives awarded to residents for keeping wild animals safe from snares and outside poaching pressures, these threats can lead to local wildlife extinctions. A family of wild dogs, for example, was snared in Upper Lupande Game Management Area, Zambia in 1991 and this species has not been sighted since (Chilikati, scout patrols). Records also exist of entire family groups of kudu killed by snares (Phiri, scout patrols).

Under the right policies, tourist hunting could pay directly to communities special producer fees for every animal legally hunted and regarded as a serious livelihood threat, such as lion crocodile, elephant and hippo. In this way the community recognizes their efforts to produce these species is related to their legal use by the tourist industry. The community, in turn, would have the responsibility to use the funds to support compensation costs and related livelihood support to households most affected by these problem animals. Compliance could be measured by the incidence of sighted predators scarred by snares, fresh poached carcasses of elephants found poached in the hunting area, and so forth. Such policies promote stakeholder cooperation to reduce mortality threats to wildlife by minimizing human costs of living with problem animals.

In Zimbabwe under the CAMPFIRE program, 50% of the license fee for hunting an elephant is returned to the local community as an incentive to reduce illegal hunting and as compensation for possible livelihood costs (Maveneke 1996). Though policies are clear on this revenue share, their compliance by the District Councils who administer the funds to their respective Wards is often less than 50% (Taylor 1995). This remains a major restraint to resolving elephant conflicts with rural communities when payments are withheld by Government authorities or are not made directly to the community producer.

Wildlife production: Investing safari revenues in livelihood needs 1. Breaking with traditions

An implicit assumption about wildlife management on customary land, especially where residents use the land for subsistence and agriculture, is that human presence equates to lowered wildlife production due to increased land use disturbances. This in turn reduces hunting revenues and incentives to invest in tourist hunting on communal land. Not all of these human-based conflicts are controllable through law enforcement since many are legal, such as cutting trees, setting bush fires, clearing land, blocking water hole use by wildlife and so forth. Conflicts that are punishable under the law are often not easily enforced, including snaring of wildlife and illegal hunting. Many of these conflicts are tied closely to rural poverty and lack of food security and keep wildlife numbers well below levels that sustain maximum harvests of trophy quality animals.

Solving this problem requires knowing how to invest in the underlying livelihood causes of these conflicts and how to promote local community leadership to help solve these conflicts. In general, safari operators who operate on communal land do not have a strong history of supporting rural livelihoods as a way of investing in wildlife production, nor do they normally see this as their responsibility. In general, they adopt more conventional strategies of supporting law enforcement to counter illegal hunting threats.

Results emerging from work in Zambia, however, suggest the relationship between improved livelihoods and increased wildlife production represents a potentially profitable and strategic basis for investing in wildlife management. These results also provide important lessons for conservation by demonstrating specific ways safari operators can direct their investments in threat reduction. They do not, however, diminish the importance of wildlife management science needed to support range management, quota setting and species-specific requirements for sustained hunting. Instead, they offer a new dimension for managing hunted populations on communal land.

2. Investment strategy for producing wildlife on communal land, the Zambian story

From 1997 to 1999, safari hunting revenues that accrued to 7 different hunting concessions in Luangwa Valley, supporting a total population of about 15,000 households, averaged $ 71,536 per area (D. Lewis, ADMADE DataManager). Less than 10% of this money supported direct improvement in household livelihoods. The balance, in approximately similar proportions, were allocated to law enforcement and community capital projects. The latter included construction costs of schools and clinics or equipment purchases like grinding mills or vehicles. During the same period, approximately 70 safari clients responded annually to a questionnaire to assess level of land use conflicts that affected their hunting success. On average, 62% complained of encountering snares during their hunt. Further evidence to the seriousness of snaring came from Mwanya concession. From a total of 5 lions hunted by safari clients in 1999, 3 had serious injuries caused by snares.

Continued work in Mwanya (Lewis and Tembo 2001 b,c) revealed that over 40% of the households in this community failed to produce enough food to meet household needs from one harvest to the next. To compensate, these households used game meat, obtained largely by snaring, to exchange with maize or sorghum from more successful farmers. In response to these facts, local leaders agreed to use their safari revenues to purchase 37 tons of maize for the 1999-2000 farming season to support approximately 600 food impoverished households. The objective was to encourage these households to remain in their fields and concentrate on weeding and producing a healthy crop. The following year food security improved three-fold for these households and rates of snaring based on incidence of safari client complaints dropped by over 50% (Lewis and Tembo 2001 b,c). In addition, of the 4 lions hunted by safari clients in 2000, only one had any sign of a wire snare scar.

The significance of this work was two-fold. One, a relatively low-cost investment directed at food security needs of households residing in a wildlife area showed a significant correlation with reduced wildlife mortality. Assuming a cause and effect relationship was real in this study, then for such investments to reduce threats to wildlife, beneficiaries must represent an actual threat to wildlife and the investment itself must effectively lower this threat. Two, community leaders played a critical role in identifying households who needed the livelihood

assistance the most and persuading them to take full advantage of this assistance to support improved farm yields. It is doubtful an expatriate professional hunting guide local or some other external person would have administered these investments as efficiently and suggests the critical need to build such livelihood approaches through locally accepted leadership structures.

3. Practical illustrations for making a livelihood investment in wildlife production

The above pilot initiative expanded into a large-scale application of this livelihood approach throughout seven different concession area from 2000 to 2002. Preliminary results are presented below as practical guidelines on specific ways a livelihood investment strategy can contribute to increased wildlife production.

?? ? ?Farmer groups

Farmers from traditional communities can also be wildlife producers if they grow enough food and remove their dependence on snaring or poaching to meet food requirements. Increased investment of time in food production reduces time that might be spent pursuing other livelihood options that may threaten wildlife. An appropriate approach is formation of farmer groups composed of households willing to share ideas and advice to help improve yields. Through such groups the linkage between food security and increased wildlife revenue through legal uses is more easily communicated and understood. Also through such groups, community earnings from safari hunting are more easily shared to support group inputs for increased farm yields and crop diversification. By linking safari revenues to farmer groups, there is a clearer incentive to being a member of a farmer group and abandoning livelihood practices that conflict with wildlife production.

Over 300 farmer groups, supporting approximately 4000 households, were identified as food insecure residents from hunting concessions in Luangwa Valley. In 2001 when many of these groups were first formed and were assisted with skills training and farming inputs, group members demonstrated their commitment to giving up dependence on wildlife in preference to farming. They demonstrated this by voluntarily surrendering 3126 snares and 76 firearms over a two month period. This represented a potential saving of over 1500 wild animals from the threat of being poached or snared (Lewis, et.al., 2001b). Through a range of interventions designed to increase yields through farming practices that help retain soil nutrients, referred to as conservation farming, approximately 38% of these group members overcame their food insecure status and emerged as food self-sufficient in just one year. This work targeted investments in hunger reduction and reduced the threat of snares to wildlife far more cost-effectively than conventional ways of law enforcement (Lewis and Tembo 2000).

?? ? ?Poachers versus hunters

Poachers are defined as people who hunt illegally. Within the above seven safari concessions, approximately 75 residents were identified by local community leaders as hunters who actively practiced poaching. On average, each hunter poached 35 animals annually and generated a total annual income of about $150 from these animals (Lewis, et. al., 2001c). Lack of access to a legal markets forced them to sell their meat within the local community at extremely low value. Most operated with relative impunity because local informers assisted them with information to avoid arrest. When they were arrested and punished by a court of law, such deterrence was often not effective and they resumed poaching when returning home.

A far more cost-effective way to reduce this threat is to offer these poachers new livelihood skills and needed inputs to encourage alternative sources of income from activities other than poaching. In addition and in recognition of their skills as hunters, employment opportunities are sought that utilize their skills as hunters in activities that promote wildlife production. The process is to transform a poacher into being a hunter, someone who values bush skills and willing to apply them to conservation.

A pilot program in 2001 engaged 17 local poachers who underwent a two month training in alternative livelihoods. Upon graduation, each received agricultural inputs and additional input support for starting alternative livelihoods. After twelve months, 15 of these hunters had ceased all poaching activities. This represented a saving of about 525 animals with a total market value of well over $100,000. In comparison to the $4250 required to train all 17 plus an additional $1700 to support their livelihood input support the first year, the potential profit returned from this investment offers the private sector a clear rationale for investing in local hunters and developing them as an asset for the safari hunting industry.

? Poultry versus game meat

Among the communities residing in these seven hunting concessions, poultry is an important marketable commodity and also represents a major source of animal protein throughout the year. NewCastle's disease, which is extremely infectious and usually fatal to chickens, is an endemic disease throughout these concession areas. It normally kills over 80% of a household's chickens and can have a devastating effect on a community after the disease runs its course. Households are left without a reliable source of animal protein and potential income is lost for at least a full year. Without alternative protein or ways of generating income, the loss of poultry translates into increased rates of wildlife snaring.

The vaccine for NewCastle's disease costs only $3 per vial, which can vaccinate 1000 birds for up to 6 months. Its use in rural areas, however, is restricted because refrigerated storage is required and its supply is from distant urban markets. Safari operators could easily solve these problems for their community partners at a negligible cost, and by doing so, communities would increase poultry yields and thus reduce their dependence on game meat.

4. Conflicts of the mind: removing cultural barriers

In Southern Africa, where safari hunting represents a $75,000,000 industry, the vast majority of the hunts are guided by expatriates as opposed to indigenous African guides. To many in rural communities, safari hunting may appear as favoring non-Africans by giving clients and their guides unlimited access over community land to hunt as they will. This often creates the unfortunate perception that the same laws that restrict local hunters from hunting do not apply to safari clients. When a single client hunts 10 animals over a two week period, which is not an unusual harvest for an African safari, residents wonder how such a large number of animals can benefit just one person. Such local perceptions are usually not aired openly but remain a sublime conflict that potentially lowers community support for tourist hunting and wildlife production.

Hunting is as much a part of African culture as it is elsewhere in the world but its appearance as practiced by safari hunting may not recognize or even respect this African tradition. It is an issue that requires greater attention if safari hunting is to be a culturally accepted form of land use. The problem requires more than simply having African hunting guides, though this would

help. Instead, it requires a commitment on the part of the private sector to engage the entire community as its partner to find areas of cooperation where mutual needs and expectations can be addressed. Practical steps for achieving this end include:

?? ? ?Increased training opportunities for local residents to assume higher paid job positions at the safari camp,

?? ? ?Increased responsibility by the safari operator to educate employees about tourist hunting and engaging them to conduct awareness campaigns about tourist hunting in the community,

?? ? ?Commitment to develop local hunters as hunting guides, community advocates for wildlife production, and managers of the hunting concession,

?? ? ?Promote wildlife markets that benefit local residents to increase public support for wildlife production, and

?? ? Adoption of a producer fee that clients pay directly to the community for helping produce animals that are a livelihood threat.

Summary

1. Policy requirements for safari hunting to support conservation on customary land

A primary aim of government policies for increasing the conservation value from safari hunting is to bind stakeholders together as an effective force in reducing threats to wildlife. As a stakeholder and potential partner to the industry, rural communities normally lack capital and knowledge about the industry, and are disadvantaged in playing a more positive role as the wildlife producer. Hence, there is a real need for policies to compensate for this disparity if rural communities are to partner effectively with the safari hunting industry. Reconciling this problem requires a policy environment that encourages fair trade practices and increased incentives for committing land to wildlife production as opposed to alternative land uses.

Community partnerships with the private sector are guided by policies that promote increased transparency of monetary benefits and transfer of skills. Joint venture agreements are an important way user rights are protected and defined for the community in such partnerships. In addition to specifying mutual obligations for managing and protecting wildlife by the community and the private sector, they also define the potential incentives when complying fully to the agreement. Benefits may include an increased lease period for the private sector or an increased share of hunting fees to the community.

The ultimate goal in promoting the conservation value of safari hunting is to ensure every trophy animal hunted on license contributes to wildlife production. This is possible if hunting quotas are properly determined and controlled since safari hunting removes only a small fraction of animals, generally the oldest males in the population. With the right policies and investment strategies, the high market value from these animals can sustain the required costs to enhance wildlife production in the hunting areas.

Hunting organizations who sponsor trading conventions where safari hunts are sold can support this goal by requiring compliance to such policies from countries where vendors originate from before hunts are sold at a trade convention. To date, however, the industry lacks any coherent agreement on what these policy standards should be and how to enforce them. Putting such measures into place may require an alliance of both conservation groups and hunting organizations to help realize the full value of safari hunting.

The core business of wildlife management institutions should be conservation, not profit. Critical to this core business is developing and enforcing those policies that build stakeholder support and cooperation for conservation. Where such institutions compete for the same revenues required by stakeholders to protect their profit margins or producer incentives, then investments in wildlife production will be limited and conservation results will diminish.

The underlying foundation for policies to work for conservation is that institutions responsible for their development and enforcement be technically qualified to link policies to good conservation practices and have the political support to enforce them fully. Given the large number of issues and stakeholders involved in safari hunting on communal land, policy development requires harmonious consultations with the stakeholders and a process of peer review to promote their implementation by participating interests.

Safari clients, who may prefer to purchase only hunts that contribute to conservation, need assurances that their purchase makes a direct and important contribution to conservation. Well-defined national policies that define how their fees reward the community producer or support directly conservation programs can increase the marketability of safari hunting. This point is well illustrated by the large demand for elephant trophies in Zimbabwe, where 50% of the total value of the elephant license is returned to rural communities to off-set opportunity costs of living with elephants (Maveneke 1996).

2. Conservation investment strategies on customary land

Despite having very different priorities, namely satisfying client demand for trophy quality animals, safari hunting does have a potentially large revenue base to generate practical solutions to a range of conflicts affecting wildlife conservation. Contrary to management approaches on privately-owned hunting areas, producing wildlife on communal land may require a completely different set of variables that relate to improving rural livelihoods. The major criteria for successfully investing in this livelihood approach is to target those households that represent the greatest threat to wildlife and to intervene with the appropriate livelihood activity that can transform these households into a net asset for wildlife production.

Establishing the necessary information to support this approach often falls beyond the expertise of most safari hunting operators. More typically, safari operators invest in much simpler strategies, like law enforcement or capital projects that enhance community social services. While such investment may seem sound, households constituting the greatest threat to wildlife are often overlooked and rates of human-caused mortality of wildlife goes unabated.

Close partnership by the safari industry with rural communities facilitates opportunities for gathering such information in planning their respective investments in threat reduction as a strategy for wildlife production. Common threats for many rural communities living with wildlife are food insecurity and low household income. For those who own firearms and cope by hunting illegally, wildlife depletion rates can severely reduce hunting quotas and the marketability of a hunting area. With the necessary background information, safari operators can mitigate these threats through carefully planned investments in local skills development and input support. In addition, such support is well within the investment levels that the economic beneficiaries of safari hunting could sustain. Ironically, examples that demonstrate adoption of this approach by the safari hunting industry on customary land are relatively rare.

Lack of community organization and qualified leadership to help guide community-wide commitment to such investment initiatives are disincentives to making these investments. Longer hunting concessions, defined and regulated through a joint venture agreement, will certainly increase private sector willingness to facilitate efforts to enhance community organization and leadership as part of their overall investment approach in building partnership with local communities. Key to this process is selecting leaders carefully and encouraging their active participation in helping implement livelihood initiatives.

Each livelihood initiative is an important step for the community to recognize as their own contribution in becoming wildlife producers and partners with a tourism industry. The step may be employment of local hunters as village scouts from safari-derived revenues or something as simple as a community-led investment to reduce dependence on game meat by growing vegetables or increasing poultry production. In Zambia, for example, the ADMADE program has facilitated a cultural appreciation through investments in farming skills that communities can become wildlife producers and beneficiaries of a growth industry when local residents become food-secure farmers.

As wildlife numbers increase and livelihood conflicts with wildlife diminish, investment strategies will change as stakeholders diversify and expand wildlife market opportunities. For example, initial investments in local hunters to stop illegal hunting through adoption of alternative livelihoods may lead to increased wildlife stocks and provide investment opportunities for engaging these same hunters as skilled manpower for legal game meat markets. When community leaders help drive such livelihood transformations, they too transform and acquire improved understanding and commitment to maintaining rural livelihoods and land use practices compatible with wildlife production and legal wildlife markets. Perhaps the most telling part of this transformation comes when the producer finds its wildlife threatened by corrupt regulation of the safari industry and invests time and resources to challenge such threats. Such communities are more likely to exist and serve the long-term interests of conservation on rural landscapes across the globe when they see the link between improved livelihoods and legal, fair-trade wildlife markets.

Conclusions

Safari hunting can provide pivotal investments and partnerships for enhancing wildlife conservation on communal or traditionally-owned land. These results depend on policies that increase the market value of wildlife for the community land owner and strengthen local resolve to reduce potential threats to wildlife production. Lack of commitment to such policies will jeopardize the conservation value of safari hunting and will also likely lead to increased conflicts with wildlife due to competing land use pressures.

International marketing conventions drive a major share of safari hunts sold world-wide. These conventions could influence policy development in support of conservation by requiring minimum compliance to policy standards for nation states sending trade delegations to market their hunts. Verifying compliance will require closer cooperation between conservation groups and hunting organizations in the monitoring of safari hunting policies and practices.

Key threats to wildlife production are often associated with household livelihood needs that lead to increased conflicts with wildlife. Under policies that promote safari hunting as a fair trade enterprise with full community partnership, reduction of these threats can become a cost-effective way to increase wildlife production. Such a livelihood approach to wildlife management is not commonly practiced by the safari hunting industry, due in part to biases toward law enforcement and concession periods not explicitly linked to joint-venture agreements that support this approach. Given the high market value the industry could offer community producers, safari hunting represents an important opportunity to test how a tourism-based industry can invest in livelihood threat reduction as a basis for increasing wildlife production.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a contribution to wildlife conservation policies in Southern Africa supported by Wildlife Conservation Society, USAID, and World Conservation Force. The authors recognize the significant contributions to this paper by the Zambia Wildlife Authority through its close partnership and support of the ADMADE programme and efforts to help reform community-based wildlife management policies.

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