Troubled times for Namibian wildlife

[Lisbeth]

BY JOHN GROBLER - 20 MARCH 2019 - DAILY MAVERICK


The seasonal flood plains of the Kwando River. (Photo by Gallo Images/GO!/Toast Coetzer)

There are worrying signs that Namibia’s legendary wild game numbers may be plummeting. Four years ago the Namibian Professional Hunters Association raised an alarm about the lack of huntable elephant bulls in the Caprivi region, where the number of communal conservancies had grown from one in 1997 to 15 today.

A professional hunter named Stephan Jacobs described a 2015 hunting trip to a conservancy in the eastern Caprivi as “the worst experience in my life” because there was so little game left. He said it was a crime to shoot anything.

“How could the MET (Ministry of Environment and Tourism) issue a quota for four hippos when there were only two small cows left in that entire stretch of the river?” he asked. “It’s absolute insanity what is going on there.”

According to MET, however, things are fine. In a letter to a local NGO seen by this reporter, acting permanent secretary and current environmental commissioner Teofilus Nghitila said communal game herds had tripled as result of the Community-Based Natural Resource Management approach.

Namibia, he said, was an African conservation success story and any suggestion to the contrary was evidence of a racist attitude that put wildlife ahead of Africans who share their living space with dangerous animals such as lions, elephants and crocodiles.

Game sightings appear to contradict this. According to informal reports from several conservationists, hunting and tour guides, lodge owners and former MET employees, wildlife in large numbers is scarcely seen anymore in Namibia.

It is no secret why the game has disappeared, they say. The worst drought in 30 years between 2013 and 2016 caused major die-offs. The hardier plains game initially survived. But the drought collided with the MET’s shoot-and-sell policy which allowed cash-strapped conservancies to harvest their animals, especially plains game, to sell into the bushmeat trade.

Poor controls resulted in the permit system being widely abused and a major public outcry on social media and in the local press ensued. As a result, according to the director of parks and wildlife management, Colgar Sikopo, the MET suspended quotas of plains game for shoot-and-sell and own use in the conservancies in 2018.

But, according to Izak Smit, a businessman who, with his photographer wife, makes monthly field trips to keep close track of the last desert lions in northwest Namibia’s Kunene region, it was too late.

He said the loss of game has caused the lions to increasingly attack local farmers’ cattle and donkeys, which has led to widespread lion poisoning, including the five made famous by the 2015 documentary film Vanishing Kings: Lions of the Namib. On all their most recent field trips, he said, the only game to be seen were small, isolated herds of zebra and springbok and the occasional pair of oryx.

“When we asked an official of the NGO Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation about the sharp decrease in numbers since 2011/12, we were told that they ‘got the 2013/14 game counting formula wrong’ which overstated game numbers and resulted in over-utilisation. The drought, of course, then followed and did the rest.”

He said urgent moratoriums on shoot-and-sell permits and own utilisation “were self-imposed by conservancies ever since, but we have yet to see any change or improvement in the status quo.”

In a written response to questions, the MET’s Colgar Sikopo acknowledged the reduction in plains game in Kunene, which he attributed mainly to the drought.

He also outlined challenges in Namibia’s Community-Based Natural Resource Management model, including human-wildlife conflict arising from the conservancies’ “good conservation practices” and mismanagement of funds by conservancy managers. But he defended the conservancy model, writing that it “is no doubt a conservation and rural development success story which we are proud of”.

His responses come as no surprise. The ministry’s international reputation and the careers of its top officials were built implementing Community-Based Natural Resource Management. Members of the MET’s new Nature Conservation Board are mainly like-minded champions of hunting.

Neither environmental commissioner Teofilus Nghitila nor the minister of environment and tourism, Pohamba Shifeta, were available for further comment.

They were in Texas attending the Dallas Safari Club Show 2019, where the current Namibian Professional Hunters Association president, Danene van der Westhuyzen was elected to the club’s new Conservation Advisory Board.

Safari Club International is the biggest hunting association in the world.


Read original article here: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article ... -wildlife/

[Klipspringer]

Here an interesting reply to this article:

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article ... -wildlife/

(long read)

[Lisbeth]

Competing conservation ideologies: Troubled times for reporting on Namibian wildlife

By Liz Rihoy and Malan Lindeque• 14 April 2019

Two competing ideological narratives have emerged in African wildlife conservation. The one is based on so-called ‘compassionate conservation’, aligned with the mostly Western animal rights movement, the other based on the human rights of the owners of the wildlife, the local people who live with wild animals. In Namibia, wildlife is thriving under the second narrative, which endorses consumptive use of wildlife.

Conservation of African wildlife and habitat is coming under increasing threat across the continent, but despite the overall gloomy prognosis, there are a few countries that can boast remarkable success.

Foremost among these is Namibia, which along with other southern African countries developed the healthiest wildlife populations and habitat on the continent during the latter half of the 20th century.

Namibia has designated about 17% of its land as state-protected areas (such as national parks), yet more than 90% of its wildlife population, numbering more than three million animals, occurs outside protected areas. Despite an onslaught of poaching by organised crime Africa-wide, Namibia still has increasing elephant and rhino populations, while lions have returned to land outside protected areas for the first time in decades.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people from some of the poorest communities in the country have seen significant improvements in their livelihoods. Namibian conservancies generated benefits of close to $10-million in 2017 alone, including the provision of more than 5,000 full-time and seasonal jobs in remote rural areas where employment opportunities rarely exist. The popularity of the conservancies is such that 86 now exist, placing an additional 20% of Namibia under a conservation management regime where wildlife is seen as a valued livelihood asset.

This is a remarkable success story.

Yet despite this, Namibia now finds itself under scathing attack, the most recent example being an op-ed by John Grobler “Troubled times for Namibian wildlife” published in Daily Maverick.

This article is remarkable primarily because it makes no attempt to hide the fact that its sweeping conclusions on “troubled times” for conservation in Namibia are based on nothing but speculation, second-hand hearsay, quoting of officials from out-of-date and out-of-context sources, anecdote and innuendo. No attempt is made to explore the scientific and social complexities of conservation or present any facts or analysis on the status of conservation in Namibia. Conversely, information from an NGO website is applied out of context, resulting in false and misleading conclusions.

Perhaps most remarkable is that while acknowledging that all those interviewed indicated that the worst drought in 30 years has led to reduced wildlife numbers, the author nevertheless concludes that wildlife numbers are falling as a result of Namibia’s community conservation initiatives. He makes no attempt to substantiate this conclusion — a disappointing and uninformative read for anyone with an interest in conservation in Namibia.

However, in another respect, this article is extremely revealing about the competing ideologies in conservation. The article is partially financed by the Cape Town-based Conservation Action Trust, an organisation closely aligned with what was formally known as the animal rights movement — a movement and group of organisations which now prefers to be collectively identified under the rubric of “compassionate conservation”.

This movement, which has its roots and a vast majority of supporters in the western hemisphere, is vehemently opposed to the consumptive use of animals. In adopting this position, they place the rights of individual animals before those of people. Given the intensity of their lobbying efforts on African wildlife, it seems fair to conclude that they consider human rights are particularly easy to disregard when they are the rights of Africans.

This ideological stance puts these organisations in direct conflict with the governments, people and conservation community of Namibia and other southern African countries.

The conservation strategies adopted by Namibia are underpinned by pragmatic recognition that the fate of wildlife lies mainly in the hands of the rural farmers who live on the front-line with wild animals and that people must have appropriate incentives if they are to live with dangerous animals.

Provision of these incentives is ensured through recognition of the rights of all people to earn a living from the sustainable use of their natural resources within legally mandated boundaries. These basic human rights are enshrined in both international and national law and such rights include sustainable and regulated hunting, both for subsistence and trophy purposes.

In terms of conservation, Namibia is probably the most outstanding global example of how successful this strategy can be. Wildlife is now more prolific outside protected areas because people want it there as they have the right to benefit from it. Compare this with Kenya, where people have no rights to benefit from wildlife and hunting is banned. Since 1977, Kenya has lost an estimated 80% of its wildlife, and what remains is almost entirely within protected areas.

But as an outstanding example of success, Namibia is also the outstanding target for those who oppose its conservation strategies on ideological grounds. Hence attempts, no matter how blatantly ill-informed, such as the Grobler article, to discredit Namibia. Such attempts will gain momentum in the coming months with the approach in May 2019 of the triennial meeting of the Convention on the International Trades in Endangered Species (CITES). This convention is the only forum for shaping rules of global trade in wildlife and represents a major battleground for those opposing a human rights-based approach to conservation.

These attempts to discredit and undermine conservation strategies for ideological reasons are undermining the rights of the people who live with these animals to earn their livelihood. These are the same people who worry daily that their children may encounter elephant or lion on their way to school and never return, or that their crops and livestock on which they rely entirely for survival will be destroyed by the marauding elephant, buffalo or hippo. In Namibia over the past two years, 10 people have been killed by elephants while trying to defend their crops, while in neighbouring Botswana, 36 people have been killed.

Upholding the rights of these often marginalised rural farmers to generate a livelihood from wildlife is essential not only for their livelihoods and dignity, but also for the survival of wildlife. Conservation efforts that fail to acknowledge the rights of people to benefit from wildlife — ensuring they have incentives to live side-by-side with dangerous animals and become wildlife defenders — force people and wildlife into a battle from which both emerge as losers.

It should be clearly recognised that these attacks on successful conservation strategies for ideological reasons not only threaten the success of conservation in Africa, but also undermine the basic human rights of some of the poorest in our countries.

The motivations and implications of these attacks should give pause for thought to all those concerned with human rights, democracy, rural livelihoods and development, not just conservationists. DM

Dr Liz Rihoy is a political scientist specialising in the politics and governance of conservation and community development in Africa. She is a Director of Resource Africa.

Dr Malan Lindeque is a conservation biologist who is the former Permanent Secretary of Environment and Tourism and the current Chairperson of the Nature Conservation Board of Namibia. He is a director of Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation, IRDNC.

[Lisbeth]

Namibia’s community wildlife conservation system has come off the rails, investigation shows


Desert elephants. (Photo: Adam Cruise)

By Don Pinnock | 14 Dec 2021

Namibia’s Community-Based Natural Resource Management is seen as a global gold standard for conservation. But a probe has found that it’s falling apart.
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An investigation into Namibia’s wildlife management policies and programmes by two environmental researchers has found that the claimed success of conservation in the country and economic benefits for poor rural communities are largely a fabrication.

After two months of visiting 29 conservancies across Namibia, Dr Adam Cruise and Izzy Sasada found that – particularly in the northern areas – larger species such as elephants, lions, zebras and oryx were in decline.

Far from being a success story, Namibia’s much-touted wildlife conservation model had achieved the opposite of what is commonly presented, they say. They found wildlife numbers declining and elephant and other wildlife populations in the Kunene Region collapsing.

Throughout the country, many rural communities in Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) areas were found to be in worse condition than before independence.


Namibia’s rural poor are getting poorer. (Photo: Supplied)

Minority groups such as San, Himba, Kavango, Caprivian and Damara were being exploited, both by the government and by larger ethnic groups such as Ovambo and Herero “settlers” who had moved into their conservancies to exploit the natural resources.

These land invasions involved overutilisation of wildlife, mining, oil drilling, logging and other natural resource appropriation.

“Namibia is always presented at CITES meetings as the exemplar of wildlife protection and community upliftment,” says Cruise. “Entities like WWF, USAID and the European Union pour millions of dollars into Namibian conservation. But more and more studies have been questioning the efficacy of CBNRM. I needed to find out for myself.”

He and Sasada chose elephants as a yardstick, since they’re key to measuring the health of Namibia’s biodiversity and take precedence in the perceived earnings and subsequent “benefits” for local communities. At the time of the study, Namibia announced it would auction off 170 wild free-roaming elephants to foreign bidders.

“We wanted to assess the areas earmarked for capture both in terms of how that might affect the elephant populations there and how they ostensibly benefit local communities,” says Cruise. What they discovered shocked them.


Desert elephants. (Photo: Adam Cruise)

They found that all wildlife populations, including elephants and gemsbok, were dangerously low. The people who were supposed to benefit from Community-Based Resource Management were hungry, impoverished and fed up with the government. Unemployment, exploitation and land expropriation were widespread and there were almost zero opportunities in terms of work, health and education.

The common complaint throughout was that many still felt under the yoke of colonisation, merely that the colonisers had changed. “The pervading mood throughout our travels,” says Cruise, “ranged from resignation and despair (mostly among the San) to anger and even open sedition, as in the Zambezi Region.”

Sasada, an anthropologist, says she found the testimonies of particularly the San people in Nyae-Nyae and N#a Jaqna conservancy difficult to bear.

“The San people I interviewed had been bullied and marginalised on all sides, both by conservancy managements who disregarded them and accepted bribes from ‘settlers’ (outsiders) in exchange for land, and by the settlers themselves, who bewitch them, underpay them for labour and steal their government pensions and child support money.”

Their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle which tourists come to experience no longer exists in these communities as they’ve lost access to the natural resources on which they depended.

A man was interviewed who had to walk several kilometres each day to collect water, since the tap provided by the conservancy had been blocked off by one of the settlers who now used it for his cattle. He said the cattle devastated the bush fruit on which they had survived and they often entered the homestead and destroyed crop gardens.



Another man said he had been to prison for three months for killing a blue wildebeest because his family was hungry. Traditional hunting had been banned in the area he lived in. He said he couldn’t fathom why a white man could come from abroad to kill an animal for fun when his own family could not hunt “for the pot” as they had done for generations.

The report found that, particularly in the CBNRM-dominated Kunene region, while many wildlife species were in sharp decline, desert-adapted elephants were marked for capture, auction and possible export.

The Namibian conservation model, it says, is an example of an increasingly “neoliberal” global policy framework as applied to biodiversity conservation, using a market-based approach with attendant socioecological effects. The model is considered successful in conserving wildlife and providing economic upliftment for impoverished rural communities. Yet assessment is warped by huge wealth disparities.

“Namibia has an annual GDP of about $10.7-billion with an average per capita income of around $5,300 a year. These figures, however, are skewed by 3,300 US dollar millionaires in the country. This hides the fact that about 18% of Namibia’s population live below the poverty line in spite of claims that its wildlife economy has been successful in reducing poverty.”

Under its conservation model, the Namibian government fully supports international commercial trade in wild animals and parts or products derived from them, including from threatened species such as elephants.

It has regularly proposed a lifting of the ban on international commercial sales of ivory and on two occasions (1999 and 2008) it was granted permission by CITES to sell its national ivory stockpile.


Namibian desert elephants. (Photo: Stephan Scholvin)

Namibia’s recent announcement that it will auction 170 live elephants elicited widespread international criticism and could weaken its tourism sector at a time when it needs to rebuild the sector after Covid lockdowns.

Tourism is a major contributor to the country’s GDP, bringing in an estimated $77-billion (11.7% of the total GDP for 2020). The sector directly or indirectly supports 123,000 jobs (16.4% of all employment).

The goal of CBNRM was to promote sustainable natural resource management by giving local communities rights to wildlife management and tourism. CBNRMs are described as “self-governing, democratic entities, run by their members, with fixed boundaries that are agreed with adjacent conservancies, communities or landowners”.

They are managed by committee members and must have wildlife management plans and prepare financial reports. Since 1998, Namibia has created 86 CBNRMs, covering more than 20% of the country and encompassing about 228,000 community members.

The report by Cruise and Sasada, however, concludes that the programme’s perceived success of wildlife conservation and economic benefits for previously disadvantaged rural communities have been grossly misrepresented.

“Far from being a success story, Namibia’s much-touted wildlife conservation model and its adherence to sustainable utilisation of wildlife through community-based management has, in fact, achieved the opposite of what is commonly presented.

“Overall wildlife numbers are declining and elephant populations in the Kunene Region are collapsing, while rural communities within the CBNRMs are as impoverished as ever, in many cases, more so.”

Namibia’s ministry of environment and tourism was approached for comment but had not responded by time of publication. DM/OBP

[Lisbeth]

Is there a decent government anywhere in Africa?

[Richprins]

Cruise is an absolute star, so to be trusted!

[Lisbeth]

It's in fact not Cruise that I don't trust

[Lisbeth]

Furore over Namibian community-based conservation

Posted on December 22, 2021 by Guest Contributor in the OPINION EDITORIAL post series.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A recent report compiled by investigative journalists and publicised by a Daily Maverick article has slated Namibia’s much-vaunted community-based wildlife conservation program. This has incensed a significant portion of the Namibian conservation community. 76 entities/people have responded by way of three separate posts below – correcting factual inaccuracies of the report and questioning the motives of the journalists. To better understand the situation, please read the above links and the three responses below. The list of compilers appears below each response.

Click on the title to read the whole article

[Lisbeth]

Why researchers Cruise and Sasada were right about Namibia’s natural resource management programme



Elephants on their way to a watering hole near the Namutoni camp in Namibia's Etosha National Park. (Photo: Media 24 / Gallo Images)

By John Grobler and Christiaan Bakkes | 08 Feb 2022

A report on Namibia’s conservation policies has raised a storm — and accusations that its two researchers were biased and plain wrong. Here’s why we say they were absolutely correct.
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In December, Daily Maverick carried an article about a report on Namibia’s Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) by two independent researchers, Dr Adam Cruise and Izzy Sasada.

They concluded that the programme’s perceived success of wildlife conservation and economic benefits for previously disadvantaged rural communities have been grossly misrepresented and is off the rails.

“Far from being a success story,” they said, “Namibia’s much-touted wildlife conservation model and its adherence to sustainable utilisation of wildlife through community-based management has, in fact, achieved the opposite of what is commonly presented.

The article was responded to by a group describing itself as Namibian Conservation Groups, consisting of 69 members of the Namibian Chamber of Environment, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and The Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations (Nacso).

They claimed the Cruise-Sasada report was done in bad faith, was illegal and unethical and was peddling an animal rights agenda to the detriment of Namibian people and animals. This is our response.

John Grobler

Nacso is a purely political vehicle for dispensing patronage in the form of hunting quotas among the Nacso membership as part of Swapo’s rural political strategies, which is more about the ruling party’s continued dominance than any form of sustainable conservation.

Nacso is noted for always generating its annual reports more than a year late, every year since its inception. Their excuse is the conservancies lack capacity. But after 12 or so years, why is that still the case if CBNRM was such a huge success?

This ad hominem attack on Adam Cruise and Izzy Sasada is thinly disguised as an academic debate that is more interested in winning the point than actually getting to the truth about CBNRM. This is becoming typical of the Namibia Chamber of the Environment being used by the ministry as an attack dog on critics of Swapo’s self-serving policies. They should be ashamed for letting themselves be used like this.

The truth is that the CBNRM model is the old campfire tyre that went flat everywhere they tried to run it in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The reality is that you simply cannot infinitely sustain an exponentially growing human population on a rapidly shrinking wildlife population because, unlike humans, animal populations tend to remain constant over longer periods of time, as we saw with the elephant population in the Kruger Park.

This is especially the case with a wildlife population that has had to endure recurring droughts, increasing over-exploitation and above all, constantly increasing human encroachment.

Nature is not a business, however the Namibian pundits of CBNRM try to package it. Tourism is the price we pay for conservation. We are fools to think we can put the cart before the oxen and think it is somehow going to work out for any one in the long run.

Namibia has been eating the goose that lays the golden egg and, as a result, the once game-rich areas of Kunene are now denuded of almost any wildlife.

The “success” they claim in the northeastern areas has nothing to do with CBNRM, but everything with the seasonal migration of the regional animal herds trying to get back to more water-rich areas in Cuando Cubango.

There are also massive questions over the methodology used in the official game counts, which are all manipulated to exaggerate the numbers to justify ever-higher hunting quotas.

Pretty soon, there is going to be nothing left, like in too many other places in Africa. This is a Potemkin conservation model: all show but no real go.

Christiaan Bakkes

Adam Cruise and Izzy Sasada are just two more people in an increasing number of researchers, journalists and academics scrutinising and questioning Namibia’s CBNRM programme.

The list of names is getting longer: John Grobler, Frederico Links, Peter Pickford, Stephan Scholvin, Sian Sullivan, Stasja Koot, Paul Hebinck, Ingrid Mandt, Izak Smit and others.

Why are more and more people from different backgrounds, including investigative journalists, political scientists, sociologists, ecologists, conservationists and concerned citizens asking questions about CBNRM?

Why are members from within conservancies getting increasingly willing to speak out against irregularities and injustices? Questions asked from different angles seem to converge at the same conclusion. Has it not occurred to the Lords of CBNRM that all these different people may have a point?

In an article in The Namibian titled End of the Game in 2015, I investigated three issues. First, the black rhino poaching epidemic that started in 2012 and was still raging at the time of writing in 2015.

Second, the suspicious deaths of elephants and the fragmentation of the elephant herd at Purros. This herd was assumed to be safe because of the successful conservancies in the area.

Third, it criticised the “shoot and sell” policy, where outside contractors could come and kill desert-adapted wildlife in bulk after paying a sum to the conservancies. I questioned the wisdom of such an industrial practice in an arid environment.

In view of these three arguments, I asked the question if the CBNRM programme in Namibia’s arid North West was still on track. The article caused an international debate.

I was writing then as a supporter of the CBNRM programme. But after 20 years in the Kunene Region, I became concerned that greed and short-term benefits were eroding the original founding principles. I wanted CBNRM personnel and conservancies to take heed and redirect their vision while there was still time.

Instead, the issue blew up in my face and disrupted my life, with a conservancy association demanding my dismissal from my safari company of which I’d been an employee for 16 years. I was quick to learn that the CBNRM community suffers no criticism.

Shortly before then, my wife had been intimidated and pushed out of the conservation organisation she was leading because she dared to oppose the black rhino hunt planned by the government.

It has become a pattern — people critical of CBNRM policies are silenced and ousted. This makes it very difficult for an insider to speak out. Many are cowed, scared and intimidated into silence with threats of losing their jobs or their tourism concessions.

That’s why it is important for independent investigators and reporters to enter and gain evidence like Cruise and Sassada did.

I do not know them personally, but I believe their findings are sound and correct. The reason I say this is because my wife and I faced the very same conditions in northwestern Namibia’s communal conservancies from 2010 to 2018.

What we experienced was a danse macabre of dead animals, meat and wildlife products. On anti-poaching patrols, government conservation personnel and community game guards were more interested in shooting gemsbok for the pot than following rhino poachers.

Not only did their gunshots give away their position, all interest in catching poachers was lost after the gemsbok was in the pot. We found little or no adherence to designated quotas and it was commonplace to see a conservancy bakkie with one or more gemsbok carcasses on the back and a hunting rifle on the seat.

We witnessed a gemsbok being shot, wounded, chased and killed from a conservancy bakkie during a police investigation. We saw the white contractors slaughtering desert wildlife from their bakkies for their own butcheries.

They were driving indiscriminately over desert plains and firing into herds of gemsbok and springbok. At their camps, we witnessed kudu and zebra being butchered and loaded into freezer trucks.

We reported an incident where a professional hunter and his client wounded a giraffe in the belly, allegedly with a compound bow. It is illegal in Namibia to use a compound bow and arrow on a giraffe.

The giraffe collapsed in agony after a day and a half of suffering, only to be found after it expired. We confronted the hunters at the carcass. An independent bow hunter later confirmed our suspicion that the entry wound was from an arrow.

After we reported the incident to the NGO we consulted for at the time, our capacity for investigating similar irregularities was curtailed.

CBNRM has not ensured the implementation of laws, rules and regulations. There is no control. The communal lands of Namibia have turned into lawless places where people can come and take what they want. Conservancy committees and hunters have become a law unto themselves.

All of this is exacerbated by poaching and drought, because the lines have become blurred. The 2021 game count bears out these observations.

In 22 years of involvement in CBNRM in the Namibian northwest, I seldom experienced accountability, moderation and conservatism when it came to “sustainable utilisation” of wildlife. It’s simply not sustainable because there is no control.

The findings of Cruise and Sasada are merited. So are those of Frederico Links as well as Sullivan, Koot and Hebinck. It takes courage to stand up against injustice.

The reactionary bluster of the CBNRM community in its responses does not adequately address the real concerns of the lack of control measures in place. In being defensive, they divert attention from the real issues.

It’s not about pro-hunting or anti-hunting. It really is about the complete and utter lack of control. The growing evidence from several different fields of expertise demonstrates this.

Time is running out and warnings are not being heeded. The opportunities to remedy the situation are being missed because it has become just about defending hunting, not about implementing effective control measures with hunting.

Namibia’s once-booming tourism trade has been paralysed by a pandemic caused by the trade in wild animals and animal products. On top of that, wildlife numbers have crashed. Still, the pro-hunting and pro-wildlife-trade CBNRM community insists that their policies are sound. In fact, it simply lacks the capacity to execute control. DM/OBP

See: A question of bias: Trophy hunting is a contentious industry and shaping research to get a desired outcome doesn’t help.

John Grobler is a Namibian veteran investigative journalist who has written for several Namibian and international newspapers such as South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, as well as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Grobler is a co-founder of the Forum for African Investigative Reporters, an association of investigative journalists in Africa established in 2004. He has won several awards over the years, most notably a CNN Africa Media award in 2008 for exposing the Mafia’s hand in the Namibian diamond industry, as well as in 2016 for exposing the role of Chinese and local business in the organised poaching of black rhino in Namibia’s Kunene Region.

Christiaan Bakkes led an anti-poaching unit as part of his military service and worked as a game ranger in the Kruger National Park. Thereafter he worked in the Damaraland desert as a guide and conservation official for Wilderness Safaris. In 2014, he was nominated as No 7 of the top 20 safari guides in Africa by Conde Nast Traveller. He currently works on education and advocacy projects with his wife Marcia, an environmental lawyer, on issues related to wildlife crime, environmental damage and social justice.

[Peter Betts]

One Sentence >> I say it Again.. TROPHY HUNTING BENEFITS NO HUMAN apart from the Oke who Pockets the LOOT