I sat on the floor at the back of the group and just listened. Vusi Tshabalala – a data collector at the Kruger 2 Canyons Biosphere Reserve and a former anti-poaching officer – was training a group of local workers to teach the importance of environmental conservation and antipoaching in their own villages. Not a single one of them had seen a rhino.
For the past two months we’ve been travelling around some of South Africa’s most important biodiversity hotspots and all of them are under threat from the communities living on their outskirts. Ivory poaching is the most well-known type of impact, but areas of rich biodiversity are facing a long list of more mundane attacks.
The most prominent is the game meat trade and subsistence hunting. The Vhembe Biosphere Reserve (VBR) in northern Limpopo and the Magaliesberg Biosphere Reserve near Pretoria are constantly removing animal snares to stem the outflow of game into local villages.
Uncontrolled plant harvesting destined for traditional healers or the open market is decimating the natural stocks of rare plants. But the worst way to protect these areas is to put a fence around them and the biosphere reserves understand this.
Vusi – from the outskirts of Hoedspruit – explained that if tourism in the Kruger area were to stop, the entire local economy would collapse. But in the same breath he pointed out that local reserves, lodges and tour operators needed to do more to include the local community in the financial benefits of tourism. Curios and souvenirs sold in most lodges are being produced en mass elsewhere and imported instead of building the skills and financing the lives of local artisans.
Most local job seekers cannot work with foreign tourists, but instead of investing in training, service providers are simply bringing in labour from other areas.
Cheapest option
This may be the cheapest option, but the only way to fight poaching is to fight poverty. Building fences – both physically and financially – simply entrenches an “us and them” atmosphere and turns the stakeholders, that the natural area could service, against each other.
Exaggerating this sentiment is that many families from the communities were forcibly removed from the areas that are now cordoned off reserves. The injustice of walking kilometres to collect firewood while on the other side of the fence an impala chews lush grass among piles of dried, dead logs will sting even the most hardened environmentalist.
Gone are the days that nature reserves can reserve nature. Environmental value cannot be protected unless it can be translated into social value. Unemployment in the communities living around the Soutpansberg in the VBR exceeds 70 percent. The arrogance of preaching the long-term benefits of conservation to a community in that situation is not sustainable, hence the VBR takes an entirely different approach by bringing communities into working relationships with the animal and plant stock of the area.
Reserves – or rather the management of biodiversity rich areas – must simply be the custodians of a natural area that help to integrate the local community with the environmental resource in a sustainable way. They are vehicles to help create a situation where environmental needs are not in conflict with social needs. “You protect the poachers in your villages but what have they ever done for you?” asks Vusi. “Has he bought school uniforms for your kids? Has he built a soccer field?”
After drawing out the honest indifference to conservation by the group – most of whom work in conservation projects such as alien plant clearing or erosion mitigation – Vusi began to change that by explaining how conservation creates direct benefits for the community. He spoke about employment, sustainable grazing, more even distribution of money from the outside and better municipal service delivery and housing.
He made the link between the mountainous areas and the preservation of clean water for the village streams and he talked about insects and local subsistence crops.
“The message we are trying to communicate is not to protect rhinos. Rhinos are just an example. Let’s save animals. Let’s save nature. We can’t live without nature.”
* Pierre Heistein is the convener of UCT’s Applied Economics for Smart Decision Making course. Follow him on Twitter @PierreHeistein
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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