There would be a carrot-and-a-stick incentive in this agreement to which the local people would have to agree if they wanted the benefits. The carrot would be the community levies. The stick would be the high cost to the community of every animal found poached. This penalty would be the removal from the quota of two animals for every one found poached. In other words, the effective cost to the community would be twice the listed value of the animal poached – which monies would be subtracted from the accumulated levy funds that the community would receive at the end of every year.

In financial terms, this would mean if a poacher killed an elephant he may personally gain US $ 30 from the sale of the ivory into the black market, but the community as a whole would lose US $ 10 000 – twice the listed community levy value for a trophy elephant bull.

And if a flock of vultures was poisoned on the carcass of a lion kill, or a Ground Hornbill was trapped, for the traditional medicine market, twice the listed values of each animal killed would also be removed from the accumulated levy funds.

It would simply not be in the community’s interests, therefore, to have ANY animal poached in the park.

Given the fact that everybody in Africa’s rural communities knows what everybody else is doing, it is unlikely that the activities of individual poachers would be tolerated. So the community itself would control the poaching activities of its own people.

Note: The poachers themselves would be integrated into the park’s anti-poaching effort – as ground coverage personnel outside the park. Their salaries would be paid for out of the community levy fund.

One must gauge the value of this dispensation against what is happening at the moment. ALL OVER rural Africa the proximate causes of the poaching are rife and bubbling, and meat poaching is becoming a commonplace activity in all those rural communities that live on national park boundaries.

The government authorities either don’t care, or they can’t control the poaching with the resources they have to hand. In many places the poorly paid game rangers are themselves a major part of the poaching rackets. The long-term prognosis for African national parks, therefore, given these realities, is bleak.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 7:49 am and is filed under Ron Thomson Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.