Don’t militarise: reduce demand to curb wildlife poaching

THE ARRIVAL of climate change brings with it large-scale habitat loss and unprecedented species extinctions. The booming black and grey markets in already-threatened animals, including the rhino, elephant, and pangolin, are worsening matters.

The black rhinoceros range has, for example, continued to shrink since 1987 across most of Africa, but has expanded in Zambia, South Africa and Namibia through recent reintroductions.

Responding to the threats, the world relies on the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, better known as Cites.

Based on an agreement between 182 countries, Cites’s aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.

At Cites COP17, which is meeting in Joburg until Tuesday, delegates were always likely to retain bans on cross-border trade in rhino horn and elephant ivory. But Cites faced requests by South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe to allow elephant ivory trade. Lifting that ban was opposed by Botswana, Kenya and Tanzania, with an even more controversial proposal by Swaziland’s King Mswati III to sell his feudal monarchy’s rhino horn stock.

A second danger to Cites’s integrity and its ability to protect wildlife is the militarisation of conservation through an anti-poaching arms race.

Markets and militarisation as responses to wildlife threats are dangerous. This is because they often fail. In addition, they rarely lead to alliances with the forces in society – especially neighbours of conservation sites – who are vital to defending threatened species.

In the pursuit of conservation, southern Africa is witnessing new platoons of soldiers and paramilitary-trained rangers, with military leaders heading anti-poaching efforts. New technologies including drones and military-grade helicopters and new partnerships with military firms are all entering the region’s parks, ostensibly to save them.

There is little public discussion about the merits of militarisation within Cites or mainstream conservation. This is despite the fact that NGOs such as Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund were exposed by WorldWatch researcher Mac Chapin a dozen years ago for disastrous adventures in military conservation.

These included what he described as a disturbing neglect of the indigenous peoples whose land they are in business to protect.

Though many poachers are indeed armed, dangerous and participants in global organised crime, we disagree that more fire power is needed to stop commercial poaching. Green militarisation is a short-sighted response with severe longterm implications.

In recent years, several hundred suspected poaches have been killed in South Africa and dozens in Botswana. Many of these deaths result from controversial shoot-on-sight policies and practices, where suspected poachers are killed without the opportunity to surrender.

This not only violates human rights, but generates hostility to conservation in economically marginalised border communities. These are the very areas from which conservation needs local ownership if it is to be effective.

Killing poachers not only violates human rights but generates hostility to conservation in economically marginalised border communities.Worse, green militarisation has opened the doors of conservation to private defence corporations.

The most caricatured must be Ivor Ichikowitz’s Paramount Group, thanks in part to his celebrated Mbombe Parabot armoured vehicle.

This also amounts to a perverse form of “greenwashing”. As the firms bedazzle us with their well-advertised commitment to environmental protection, we are left blind to the destruction they leave in their wake.

Likewise, the ideology known as the financialisation of nature is based on the view that a market problem, like the threat of extinction posed by poachers, can be treated best with a market solution. Trade in wildlife is especially vulnerable to this logic.

Swaziland’s proposed international rhino horn marketing strategy was firmly opposed by leading environmental experts. South Africa still ostensibly supports the ban. But it’s been under pressure from rhino horn factory-farming, like John Hume who owns 1 400 rhino. This is more than Kenya’s entire rhino population. If Swaziland was allowed an exemption, Hume and other rhino breeders were likely to move animals across the border for horn harvesting and lucrative sales.

Neither green militarisation nor legalisation of cross-border trade in rhino horn and ivory are just or sustainable responses to wildlife loss. The only surefire strategy to stop commercial poaching is drastically reducing demand.

Wildlife fetches staggering prices. A kilogram of rhino horn, for example, fetches $60 000 (R823 845) – more than gold, diamonds and cocaine. Until buyers lose interest or shift to a new fad (as happened a century ago to ostrich feathers), there will never be a shortage of people willing to procure wildlife, risking their lives.

Cites, to its credit, has done a great deal to prioritise demand reduction especially in Asia, where the largest markets exist. And, to their credit, the South African and Namibian authorities are finally naming and shaming the smugglers they catch.

Even proponents of green militarisation often agree that reducing demand is the single most important response. But it is vital to do so with cultural sensitivity and respectful relations with, and involving the communities surrounding the parks. –www.theconversation.com Libby Lunstrum is associate professor of geography at York University in Canada and Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at Wits University