I've been involved in a debate on another website about CBNRM and hunting and I received the analysis below.

Can anyone here explain, (in a few short sentences), what's really going on in Zambia?

Thanks..

"As for Zambia, ADMADE has been an unmitigated disaster.If there is any doubt about what ADMADE has done in the name of conservation and community empowerment one need go no further than to examine Stuart Mark’s Nabwalya Project in the Luangwa Valley.

Marks points out that ADMADE had assumed that villagers ‘would readily trade their access (both as endowments and entitlements) to wildlife for community revenues from safari licenses to foreigners’. He showed that wildlife numbers began to decline substantially in the Nabwalya Chiefdom from 1993, the year ADMADE came to the area.

This he ascribed to the toll taken by wildlife scouts from the operation of an official ‘culling station’ from 1991, the killing of game for rations and from ‘assumed privilege’ of one sort or another. To this was added the low morale of ZAWA staff and the failure of crops due to drought and elephant depredations. He further pointed out that prior to ADMADE the chiefdom was not an open-access area, for few local men had the means and knowledge necessary to hunt commercially.

When ADMADE was ushered in emphasising wildlife protection at the expense of community development, villagers subsisting on wildlife were criminalised, greatly impacting on them, particularly in times of drought and famine. Marks clearly reveals that for Government (GRZ) wildlife had become a commodity for generating revenues ‘shifting the local patronage system from meat, protection and support to money and employment – a process requiring major transformations in social and cultural organisation’… And ‘other changes – a growing population, a shift from corporate (lineage) identities to endemic individualism, recurrent drought-induced famines and resource scarcities – are regional phenomena. How this symmetry of new changes and regional factors will alter valley life and livelihoods in the future remains open-ended’.

"It is the criminal human rights abuses visited upon villagers by NPWS and ZAWA personnel which took place in Nabwalya during and after ADMADE, which entirely consigns to the dustbin of history the rationale of outside intervention and force in the guise of CBNRM. In Nabwalya Central the survey of households in 2006 showed that the percentage of arrests, 38% (174/460), among respondents was even higher in some village clusters.

In 2006, in a summing up of ADMADE, Marks’ report on Nabwalya found that there was little to support Lewis’ earlier hypothesis (the ADMADE champion). Indeed, rather than rural residents benefiting from their natural resources, ADMADE had ushered in ‘sustainable use conservation’ with legal access to wildlife only assured through wealth and privilege.

A graphic account of human rights abuses and the torture of suspected poachers in the Zambezi Valley during the tenure of ADMADE, particularly by the ZEBRA section of the Zambian Paramilitary, acting in consort with NPWS/ADMADE, the Zambia Police, and white Honorary Rangers, is recounted by a mission-educated villager, Mario Kawayawaya, converted to commercial poaching because of the effects of ‘illiteracy, poverty, hunger and cultural degeneration’, a man who later became a dedicated conservationist...

In the Sichifula-Mulobezi GMAs, villagers who were found poaching were moved by the chiefs – with the approval of ADMADE - to areas with little wildlife. This totalitarian forced removal, one redolent of apartheid, goes completely against the Constitution and the rights of citizens.

And on the Kafue Flats where ADMADE was implemented for eleven years from 1986, it was clear that little had been achieved, given the financial support of WWF and income from hunting. Crucially, GRZ did not initiate resource-sharing initiatives over wildlife and fisheries, and no consultative process with local people was ever undertaken by ADMADE."
In Zambia, safari hunting is conducted on that portion of customary land classified as a Game Management Area (GMA).

Elected Community Resource Boards in these GMAs enter into Hunting Concession Agreements (HCA) with ZAWA (parastatal Game Department) and safari operators who have won the tender for the particular GMA for a period of ten years. For this they pay an annual concession fee and trophy license fees - 50% of which is supposed to go to the CRB for payment of village scouts and for community projects.

However, the CRBs have not been paid what they are owed, and the scouts simply become part of criminal bushmeat and ivory gangs, and there are no community projects, and ZAWA becomes ever more desperate to fund its inflated and corrupt HQ by issuing inflated quotas...

In 2003, I began implementing my Landsafe socio-ecological development model in the Luangwa Valley, a fanciful name for working with a particular chief and his people by forming a community trust, and starting to vest the land in that trust so that it can never be sold or alienated; and to enter into co-management agreements with Government over the renewable resources.

We began with two adjoining chiefdoms, a major part of their land being a primary safari hunting concession. We bought out the concessionaire and began hunting, but in trying to deal with the corruption fell foul of the MMD Government and it was removed on totally illegal grounds.

Since then we have assisted the community in vesting land suitable for game ranching or wilderness use into the community trust, and have then leased it - the money accruing to the community trust fund. Now the CRB, the chief and the Trust, following the Landsafe formalization procedures, are busy negotiating with ZAWA for the hunting safari rights on their own land, and for co-management rights to the forestry, fishery and water.

The battle continues...and I await a new Government - having been deported by the present one."

Dated material.