The conservation debate is often the classic man-animal conflict by another name. To save the tiger is to abandon the forest-dwelling tribal. To let leopards roam farmlands is to snatch farmers’ livestock. To save whales is to deprive the fishing industry. To protect forests is to stall national development.
Namibia, however, has pursued a different path ever since its independence in 1990. It chose to write environmental conservation into its constitution, and two decades on, 42 per cent of its area, land and water, is under some form of conservation management. That’s much more than what any other country has managed to achieve.
Tellingly, the Namibian coat-of-arms features a fish eagle, two oryxES, sand dunes and the wondrous desert fossil plant Weltwitschia. Located in southwest Africa, surrounded by South Africa, Botswana and Angola, Namibia has mountains, deserts and a sandy shoreline. With an extremely arid climate and sub-Saharan Africa’s lowest rainfall average, the country has little scope for agriculture (only about 5 per cent of its economy). Subsistence farming and livestock rearing is the way to go: as a local saying has it, ‘A Himba is nothing without his cattle.’
The country’s traditional tribes and bush communities, splintered and pushed around by years of invasion and colonialism, are extremely poor. What Namibia once had a wealth of was wildlife: elephants, giraffes, zebras, rhinos, lions, leopards and cheetahs among others. But years of hunting by colonialists, poaching by natives and militants and military occupation all but wiped out this wealth. By the 1980s, there were just a few hundred of each species left. Its lions had more or less vanished. A drought in 1992 left many other species on the brink of extinction.
“Death and despair… surrounded our country,” said John Kasoana, who heads Namibia’s Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC), in a rivetting TED Talk, part of a popular lecture series on ‘ideas worth spreading’.
The IRDNC, set up in the early 80s, began working informally with community leaders and wondered if they could depute somebody trustworthy to protect and monitor the country’s wildlife; somebody who knew the bush well, who knew the wildlife well. “Yes, our poachers,” replied a bright Himba tribe headman, Kasoana recalls. And so, poachers (“the best ones”, those with top reputations) were put in charge of catching outsiders and the less accomplished of their own ilk.
Intrinsic to that model was conservation of another kind—of the impoverished communities that wanted a better life in a land with few opportunities. What began as a community-driven game guard system (recall that ownership of land was largely restricted to Whites under the apartheid regime) eventually matured into conservancies within years of independence. Now communities get rights to their traditional land and the animals in it, much like freehold farmers.
With ownership comes pride and accountability and a tangible stake in conservation. Conservancies now tie up with business enterprises; in return, tourism ventures train and employ locals, offering youngsters new opportunities. From the days of colonial deputies peering into cooking pots to nail native poachers, Namibia has succeeded in marrying its rich heritage with modern ideas to catch up with a changing world.
After all, tracing rhinos through GPS and having helicopters fly them, says Kasoana, is easier than a headman summoning spirits from a sacred fire to guide them to the animal. And yet, he adds, “Our attitude is important. If we pretend to be concerned and helpful but still see the community next to a conservation area as a threat, conservation won’t work.”
The results validate that contention. Namibia is now home to the world’s largest population of free roaming cheetahs and black rhinos, and they flourish on community land. It is also the only country where the number of wild lions is increasing—a 600 per cent jump in two decades—even in non-protected areas. While the elephant population has more than doubled between 1995 and 2008 from 7,500 to over 16,000, the number of zebras has grown from 1,000 to 27,000 since 1982. It also has one of the largest seal colonies in the world.
The success has been miraculous in many ways. And some areas have already started to confront a problem of plenty. Increasing numbers of animals now pose a threat to farmers and herders. Most conservancies offer cash compensation or replace cattle lost to lions or cheetahs. Some are trying to place GPS tracking collars on predators to alert villagers of close movements.
When the community conservancies began in 1996, they had little income to show. Now, more than 70 conservancies earn in excess of $4.8 million, mostly from joint venture tourism. Trophy hunting, however, remains a big draw and the ‘sustainable use of wildlife’ gets the conservancies a substantial cash income. The money has gone into building schools, infrastructure, and, most importantly, the treatment of AIDS. Nearly 200,000 people in a population of 2.3 million suffer from AIDS, amid an overall life expectancy of just over 62 years.
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Namibia’s may be a picture perfect conservation model, but IT is frequently put to test. In 2011, an entire pride of desert lions was poisoned to death in the country’s Kunene region, where researchers earlier reported a loss of males in six of nine major prides due to selective trophy hunting. As late as last year, a spike in rhino poaching in South Africa threatened to cross the border into Namibia. On Christmas day, a herder spotted a poached female rhino, her calf wandering about in a canyon. It had been around four days since the mother’s killing and the dehydrated calf died too.
Such challenges will persist because Namibia is still poor and only one in eight Namibians benefits from conservation. The Christmas story, however, did not end there. The poacher who had expertly put a bullet to the rhino’s heart and sawn off its horn surrendered within 24 hours of the carcass being sighted. The community turned him in, a full confession was secured, and the man put behind bars. Change is never easy. But it is finding its way in Namibia.
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