Sport/Trophy Hunting: Part of the Problem or part of the Solution?
Nanyuki, 2 February 2005
crocodile - kept alive without food - poached
Reading through some of the literature on the conservation benefits of sport/trophy hunting one gets the impression that in Southern Africa a lot of lessons have been learnt. Benefits to the local communities and tax income for the state seem to justify the investment in hunting infrastructure and controls. However, a few years ago when I watched the Cook Report on canned hunting in South Africa, I concluded that even countries with good governance - by African standards - have problems in controlling some of the excesses of sport hunting. Interestingly, this same documentary showed an undercover investigation having a Spanish hunting outfit offering some potential clients gorilla hunts in South East Cameroon and ways to export the trophies. This brings us to Central Africa and a region of the continent which, according to Transparency International and many other experts, has the biggest problem with corruption and governance of any on the African continent. The Congo DRC is one of the countries in question.
Let's as a first step look at the Forestry and Wildlife Utilization tax code which the Ministers of Finance and Environment of DRC signed into law on April 20, 2002. I received a copy of this document from a European zoo keeper, who in turn had been presented it by an animal dealer offering the species on the list available for capture and export. When I tracked down the animal dealer it turned out that he received the document from a CITES official in Kinshasa who was also a relative of the Minister of Environment. When I presented the document at the Ministry in Kinshasa to confirm its authenticity nobody knew about the existence of this new decree, not even the permanent secretary in the Ministry. It took phone calls to Yokahama, Japan where the Minister was attending an ITTO conference, and to the World Bank offices (which had been involved in the drafting off this new tax code), to confirm that indeed the document was genuine. There were also reports of South African hunting companies at the time polishing the door handles in the Ministry.
This tax code is a crucial issue in the context of the trophy hunting debate because it offers all of the totally protected species for capture and hunting. The mountain gorilla is U$ 1000 to capture and U$ 500 to hunt, the bonobo and chimpanzee are U$ 150 to capture and U$ 300 to hunt, the two species of elephant are U$ 500 to capture and U$ 1000 to hunt, the northern white rhino -the most endangered large mammal in the world today - is available for U$ 3000 to capture and U$ 3000 to hunt, the okapi goes for U$ 1200 to capture and U$ 500 to hunt.
Interestingly enough the Bongo is not listed at all.
Various parties have tried to figure out the logic, not only when it comes to offering what are officially classified as totally protected species for hunting and capture but also the dollar amounts involved for hunting and capture (there is additionally an official 'Holding Permit' on the same list). Nobody I know of has succeeded.
It should also be mentioned that at the time these laws were signed into force the DRC was suspended from CITES but has been readmitted since.
Despite contacting a wide range of officials and representatives of conservation NGOs it is again not clear if any changes have been officially effected concerning this "arête interministeriel" since it was signed into law in 2002.
During a trip to Kinshasa earlier this year, with a representative of a conservation NGO, we were confronted by the fact that hunting licenses are being issued for various hunting reserves including an area in the Northern Congo where we have been running a conservation project. A project we had originally negotiated with the MLC rebel government. We also discussed this development with the German advisor to the Ministry and were told that the scientific authority had not been consulted in these allocations and that he personally was very concerned with the lack of data concerning the remaining populations of some of the species on offer. Some of the best estimates for some of the endemic Congo mega fauna seem to indicate a very, very drastic decline having taken place during the war years:
-Eastern Lowland Gorillas down from 17 000 to 5000
-Northern White Rhino from 32 to 10 or less
-Elephants from 90 000 to 14 000
-Bonobos in two research sites down by 75%
-The number of zebra left is less then 20
-and the same figure is estimated for the Derby Eland
family of gorillas - poached
Clearly this is a country where wildlife poaching is pretty much totally out of control and the first step has to be to get some kind of control back over the National Parks and other protected areas, including hunting reserves. While the ICCN web page states: 'Braconnage intensif; 'Lutte anti braconnage impossible par manque de moyens,’ for the Bili-Uere region, the report by the hunting party who checked out the area for 3 days is: “The most important thing about this area is, there are hardly any signs of poaching....â€
While I do believe that sport/trophy hunting can contribute to conservation objectives, I consider the opening of hunting and the offering of any quotas irresponsible until such time as either the scientific authority or an independent third party has done some census work to establish what populations exist and to what extent sustainable hunting can be considered a conservation tool.
In addition to the conservation angle there is the issue of transparency and accountability and the claim by professional hunting associations to have the above as their objective when negotiating with authorities in third world settings. In the case of the agreement signed by Congo Safaris Expeditions (superceding supposedly an earlier one signed in 2003 with another hunting firm listed as: OTANG RDCongo), we were given a quick look at one of the documents which showed that none of the 2002 surface allocation tax of U$ 15 per hectare was mentioned, neither was the daily entry fee of U$ 35 for all members of a hunting party. There were some nice but very vague terms regarding improving the local infrastructure and helping with education and health care facilities. However, there were no specific terms and conditions which could be considered legally binding. We then saw in Isiro another such agreement which was signed with another company in 2003 and was very similar to the one we had seen in Kinshasa and also included duty free privileges on all imports, including alcohol. (The hunting company newsletter also states: “The E-mail I received last month also mentioned that a “few more details†regarding government fees still will had to be worked out.â€
remains of an elephant - poached
I then received a phone call from a Mr.George Angelides who is meant to be the owner of Congo Safaris Expeditions. I pointed out that the agreement we had seen, in my opinion, encouraged poor governance and the waving of all the major tax payments could not possibly be in the interest of the DRC. That for any official in the DRC to hand out exploitation rights to millions of hectares of national territory, without any real income of any kind, was unheard of. Mr. Angelides confirmed that he had a 5 year tax holiday agreed on by the minister (the negotiating and handing out of hunting concessions is supposedly the responsibility of ICCN, the parastatel which manages all the protected areas).
The latest news release confirms that Congo Safaris Expeditions has secured some 3.1 million hectares of the Bili Uere concession it would appear based on the above 5 year tax holiday (3.1 million hectares at an allocation fee of U$ 15 per hectare would come to some U$ 45 million). This supposedly in addition to the range of other concessions the company states it is still holding.
We are being told that the presence of a hunting party would stabilize things in terms of poaching. We have worked on this same objective for the last three years and a Dutch NGO has invested over U$ 500 000 to buy the coffee production of the region, which most likely amounted to about half the economic product. In the MLC days we were provided with a platoon of soldiers which on two occasions confronted poaching gangs confiscating elephant meat, AKs and other assault rifles. However, no such campaigns have been possible since the transition government came to power and elephant poaching is going on unabated and appears to be actually on the increase despite the boom to bust stage having to be very close. As far as the intelligence as to who, what, where, when and how, concerning the still ongoing elephant poaching, the data is there and if there was a government authority willing to act on it then action would be possible.
The area allocated to Congo Safaris Expeditions is also the very area where in the last few years a huge influx of cattle people from Tchad has taken place. Whenever we overfly the area we see tens of thousands of cattle being grazed in what is a Wildlife Reserve and said Hunting area. Again, this fact has been reported to Kinshasa without any real reaction.
As such, my view is that a hunting party coming in for a few months and taking a few of the more desirable species and spreading some money among local officials and chiefs, can clearly not be the answer to stabilize this area. This needs a large scale concerted effort with adequate resources and a commitment to be on the ground 12 months a year. It will require the taking on of well armed poaching gangs/bandits, which besides military units, include Sudanese gangs and those regularly invading from the CAR as well as the Mbororo cattle people from Tchad.
We doubt that, even if this was the long term intention of Congo Safaris Expeditions, would be possible since the local partner in this venture seems to be the local chief which is at present a member of parliament in Kinshasa. The missionaries who used to live in Asa in the past report of tons and tons of elephant meat and ivory coming out on the very road leading through Asa, the traditional chiefs headquarters. This is an ongoing scenario, and there is still elephant meat and ivory arriving on pretty much a weekly basis in Zemio, which is the other side of the border in CAR. Being somewhat familiar with the Azande culture, it is not possible that this level of trade could take place without the traditional chief and the rest of the administration endorsing it and benefiting from it.
This is where things stand today. The hunting community which seems keen to see Congo opened up for their sport does not seem to believe in the basic level of transparency and accountability which should go with operating in this part of Africa. Several requests to be officially given a copy of the agreement in question have gone unanswered.
I do not believe that this is the approach to opening up hunting in the DRC. I believe it is not in the interest of the hunting community or conservation.
The above scenario of course is not untypical for the DRC and what is and has been going on with natural resource exploitation for decades. However in the meantime the international community has concluded that while it might be very difficult to improve the quality of governance from within, there is pressure which can be brought from outside. The OECD of which the US, Greece and many other countries are members have ratified a convention which makes it illegal, under national laws, for any national to be involved in any corrupt practices in international business transactions. The US Anti Corruption Provisions, as part of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has similar provisions. They in turn apply to agents as well and clearly the question arises if an American National hunting under the present 'tax holiday status' becomes liable under this act.
hippopotamus - poached
While the DRC's 1982 hunting laws are pretty comprehensive, they do not seem to include a range of provisions which have since been adopted in some other sub-Saharan countries which offer sport/trophy hunting (like official conservation/community development fees, annual modified quote systems based on census data, official government employed hunting guides supervising each hunt, etc). Adapting these laws to the established 'best practice' scenario and combining it with realistic taxes and fees, allocating concessions in a transparent manner (excluding monopoly deals with tax holiday benefits), should be an essential prerequisites for opening up sport/trophy hunting in the DRC.
In addition there should be some guarantee from the central authorities that income being derived from hunting and the allocation of hunting concession should go back into the management of the areas in question. As it stands the government does not have a single ICCN representative in an area of some 7 million hectares of protected areas (wildlife reserves and hunting concessions).
Poor quality governance is clearly one of the biggest problems in achieving development and poverty alleviation in many of the countries concerned. A deteriorating environment in this context will only make things more difficult and costly down the line. In the south east of the CAR and now on two occasions in the Bili Uere area there have been incidents of poaching gangs raping and pillaging villages. In the CAR whole communities have abandoned their homes and fled. This is the result of poachers no longer being able to make a living from selling bush meat and now using their weapons for common banditry. If there is to be any hope that things will change in future, the western donor and investor community clearly has to lead with examples. Natural resource exploitation deals which are not transparent, in this context, are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Karl Ammann Nanyuki, 11/2/05
Yours sincerely
Karl Ammann
The carcass looks very fresh - and meat floating in water for a long time gets discoloured while the one in the pic looks red/pink - indicating it was recently killed and butchered.
