Conservationists decry drought-hit Namibia’s plan to cull national park wild animals for meat

1 Sep 2024

Namibia is planning to shoot hundreds of animals in national parks to feed drought-hit communities — but conservationists have questioned the plan’s true intentions.

With grazing for cattle drying up as the Namibian drought deepens, all that meat and grass over the fence in protected parks must seem an obscene waste of resources to rural communities. Namibia’s Swapo government has decided to be magnanimous: bring in hunters and hand out meat.

Namibia is experiencing one of the most severe droughts in its history, with reports indicating it could be the worst in 100 years. This has led to widespread food insecurity, critically low water levels and significant agricultural losses. About 1.4 million people, more than half of Namibia’s population, are expected to face high levels of food insecurity.

In response, the administration’s sights are set on 723 animals — 30 hippos, 60 buffalos, 50 impalas, 100 blue wildebeest, 300 zebras, 83 elephants and 100 elands — sourced mainly from five national parks. The cull will be carried out by “professional hunters and safari outfitters”. According to unconfirmed sources, the killing has already begun.

This will, according to a press release from Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, “assist in managing the current grazing pressure and water availability by reducing wildlife numbers in some parks and communal areas”.

It adds that this was arranged with the office of the prime minister and the Meat Corporation of Namibia (Meatco) and will help mitigate the impact of the drought. This is in order, evidently, despite the absence of a game count or an environmental impact assessment.

An added value, according to the ministry, will be to reduce human-animal conflict with 83 identified elephants. The press release outlining the cull (essentially a cull hunt) added that elephants had killed a person in the Uukwaluudhi Conservancy in August.

Flawed plan

While recognising the severity of the drought, several conservationists say the plan is deeply flawed and question its true intentions. They point out that cattle do not graze in national parks, so how could culling wild animals in parks bring relief to livestock farmers active outside of them?

In an open letter to Namibia’s environment department, Izak Smit of the NGO Desert Lions Humans Relations Aid joined some dots about the cull.

Using a human-wildlife conflict argument, he said, had become a scapegoat to accommodate dark abuse agendas, one of which was providing trophies when this cannot be justified in terms of sustainability.

Witnessing the slaughter of family members can cause lasting trauma and increase aggression towards humans in surviving elephants, exacerbating the very conflict the government claims to be addressing.

Another dot is that because the “meat festival/donation” comes just months before the elections, it raises suspicions that the meat will serve the same function as food parcels and T-shirts did in the past — to solicit votes in contested constituencies.

Communities towards the west, Smit noted, were more poverty- and hunger-stricken than those that would receive the meat, which were communal areas where Swapo’s mainly rural votes came from.

It was also “false to claim that game like elephants and giraffes compete with the rural community cattle and goat herds”, said Smit.

Short-term thinking

The environment ministry claims the culling will provide hungry people with meat, but according to elephant biologist Dr Keith Lindsay, it will provide only short-term relief and sets a dangerous precedent of reliance on wildlife populations to solve human problems.

“This practice, if adopted and normalised, is very likely to create a continuing demand on vulnerable wildlife populations that would be unsustainable in the dwindling areas of natural habitat. There is also the risk that it will give neighbouring nations a strong case for doing so as well, triggering a colossal disaster.”

Conservation writer Adam Cruise pointed out that wildlife in national parks are key attractions for tourists. “It may not sit well with tourists if they know the elephant or the zebra they are photographing one day will be butchered for meat production the next.”

The “too many elephants” narrative, often employed to legitimise culls, is misleading and based on inflated population estimates. More than 90% of African elephants have been lost in 100 years — from around five million in 1900 to 430,000 today. Around 10% of the surviving population is believed to be killed annually, but evidence is limited, and many deaths are undocumented.

Both Zimbabwe and Botswana used the “too many elephants” argument to justify hunting quotas, the income from which seldom benefits local communities.

Political dimension

Reasons for the cull, said Smit, seem to have come from another direction. The decision was made at the African Wildlife Consultative Forum hosted by the environment ministry in October 2023 and attended by the huge US hunt association Safari Club International. At that meeting, the availability of trophies was the highest topic on the agenda and it was there, he said, that the plan was probably hatched.

Given that trophy animals have become almost non-existent in conservancies, the cull hunt adds up to “enabling delivery of trophy hunting opportunities in national parks to the international hunting organisations”. During that forum, said Smit, the protected desert lion Mwezi was illegally shot as a trophy by one of the delegates.

Culling wildlife during a drought is very risky. The alternation of droughts (bust cycles) and wet periods (boom cycles) is a natural process needed to weed out weaker genes produced during boom cycles through natural selection. This favours the predators that remove the weak as part of a cyclic survival mechanism.

This was how nature intended it, said Smit. By culling the “surplus” indiscriminately — because hunters have no way of determining or recognising weak genetics — the chances of emerging from the drought with a viable core population of the strongest genes for repopulation are diminished.

The cull, he said, also risked damaging Namibia’s N$14.2-billion (R14.3-billion) tourism economy, which is the largest source of jobs in a country with a 36% unemployment rate and where more than 50% of young people cannot find jobs.

Possible alternatives

Veteran Namibian environmental journalist John Grobler offered another solution.

Instead of shooting the 723 animals, he said, buy up all the cattle now being grazed in the Bwabwata Park and rural conservancies north of the disease control fence and process them at the financially struggling and vastly underused Meatco abattoirs — and keep supplying that meat until the first rains arrive.

“That way, the communal farmers get a major cash injection into the local economy by being able to sell cattle they otherwise cannot move south of the Red Line fence and likely are going to struggle to get through the drought, and Meatco gets much-needed throughput in otherwise underutilised abattoirs that so far have otherwise been a massive waste of taxpayers’ money.”

This would reduce the communal cattle herd in return for cash that would be easier to hang on to than “keeping that skinny old cow alive”.

It would also reduce pressure on depleted grazing and water resources to allow for better recovery and regeneration once the rains return.

Daily Maverick emailed questions to the Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, but had not received a reply by the time of publication.

Monetising animals

Namibia has always been quick to monetise its wildlife. In 2012 it captured and sent 10 baby rhinos, five elephants and other wildlife to a notorious zoo in Cuba. Then it captured and sold 100 wild elephants to a small private reserve and in 2018 auctioned a rare black rhino to hunters for $350,000.

In 2019 it tried to auction 1,000 animals from national parks and in 2009 it sold 10 tonnes of ivory from its stockpile.

In 2020 the environment minister insisted he would sell the country’s huge, 50-tonne ivory stockpile to the Far East and, according to a government oﬃcial, attempted to do this in 2020. This would be illegal, according to Cites rules.

In 2021, the government triggered global headlines when it tried to auction 170 elephants from national parks to zoos and trophy hunters. The scheme failed due to questions of legality and a massive international outcry.

That year it sold oil rights in the headwaters of the Okavango Delta.

A petition against the cull has been set up within Change.org. By the time of publication, it had generated about 7,500 signatures. DM

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Flawed plan

Short-term thinking

Political dimension

Possible alternatives

Monetising animals