In February 2001, Zimbabwe’s Financial Gazette ran a story on the Center for Private Conservation’s study Private Property Rights to Wildlife: The Southern African Experiment.  The study, by Kay Muir-Leresche and Robert H. Nelson, describes how the southern African countries of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa improved conditions for both wildlife and people by giving greater control over wildlife to landowners--from large game ranchers to poor, rural communities.

These southern African programs succeeded where others failed because they integrated conservation and commerce.  When poverty is widespread, people worry about where their next meal is coming from.  For them, protecting wildlife for its own sake is an unimaginable luxury.  If wildlife cannot pay its way, it will be replaced by something else that does (crops, for example).  Ignoring these basic economic truths has been the reason for the failure of attempts around the world to separate the rural poor from the environment that surrounds them.  It has also contributed to opposition to trade agreements such as CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) that seek to reduce the value of wildlife.

In places like Africa, it is the value of wildlife, in conjunction with some sense of ownership over that wildlife, that offer the best hope of salvation for both people and the environment.  Zimbabwe has been at the forefront of this movement, but sadly, Zimbabwe today is a place of strife, torn apart by a government that seems to care little about the law, order, or rights of its people.  Yet, in the not too distant past, this same place developed a model for conservation through commerce, all possible because of property rights.

As much as twenty-five years ago, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa began altering their legal regimes to give full control over the use of wildlife to the private owners of the land on which the wildlife are located.  As a result, wildlife ranching, which includes hunting, tourism, and the sale of meat, hides, and horns, became a win-win for all involved.  Wildlife populations of species like eland, kudu, giraffe, cheetah, rhino, sable and impala rose rapidly.  Muir-Leresche and Nelson conclude,  “Privatization of control over use of wildlife has had more success in promoting biodiversity in the southern African region than any other policy measure.”

Private gains aside, the wider social gains, until recently, included a reduction of governmental subsidies to the beef industry; an increase in Zimbabwe’s tourism industry, which in turn, benefits other industries; less rangeland erosion; and enhanced biodiversity.  In a 1998 report, Zimbabwe’s government showed that “30 percent of Zimbabwe is under some form of wildlife management and it is the fastest growing sector and a major foreign currency earner in the national economy.”

In Zimbabwe today, the greatest threat to both people and wildlife is politics.  There are few, if any, major foreign currency earners in Zimbabwe anymore, as the country’s descent into political violence has resulted in hyperinflation and shortages of everything from gas to grain (in a country that has typically exported grain).

Yet, whatever its other problems today, the privatization of wildlife puts southern Africa in the forefront of international wildlife conservation.  Although current threats of land confiscation and other acts of violence by the Zimbabwean government endanger the past gains of wildlife privatization, Zimbabwe has been part of an important experiment in private wildlife management that has lessons for the rest of the world.