Poverty fuels horn trade, study shows

ECONOMIC and political elites in South Africa continue to reap the benefits of conservation while local communities remain excluded and marginalised.

This is according to an editorial by Dr Annette Hübschle of the Environmental Futures Project at the Institute for Safety Governance and Criminology at UCT and her colleague Dr Andrew Faull, a senior researcher at the centre.

Their editorial, Organised Environmental Crimes: Trends, Theory, Impact and Responses, was published in a recent special issue of the Institute for Security Studies and the institute’s journal SA Crime Quarterly, which was devoted to organised environmental crime.

Faull and Hübschle note how wildlife crimes have moved up global security and policy agendas. “While conservation is often regarded as a pastime of economic elites, the impact of environmental degradation disproportionately affects poor people.

“The role of local people in the protection and management of natural resources has become a policy prerogative in many southern African countries. In the current environment, the perception that wild animals are valued more highly than black rural lives is difficult to dismiss. South Africa, meanwhile, remains the most unequal country in the world.”

Inequality predicts all sorts of societal ills, includ- ing crime, write the researchers. “Structural inequality is also reflected in terms of who benefits from conservation in general, as well as from the protected areas and profits associated with the sustainable use of natural resources.

“It’s perhaps not surprising that some people who have been denied sustainable livelihood strategies in the face of endemic corruption and abundant opportunity might be tempted by the promise of high returns and low risk to get there.

“Rhino horn, for example, has a street value higher than that of heroin or cocaine. The profits from a single rhino horn trump the annual income of many rural residents in South Africa, some of whom organised crime networks try to recruit as poachers.”

But the real perpetrators are organised crime networks, corrupt government officials and members of the wildlife and conservation industries who facilitate the flow of illicit wildlife and plant contraband, the authors argue.

“Law enforcement officials and policymakers have been focusing their efforts on reining in poachers rather than buyers and intermediaries.”

“Their assessment is that broad- based community empowerment is key, not only to addressing structural inequality and poverty, but also to alleviating wildlife crime.”

Local communities could, for example, become protectors of wildlife and conservation areas “if they were granted agency”.