I had a fascinating conversation the other day: I gave a lift to our next-door neighbour, a hard-working lady who earns a living buying produce in the villages near Arusha, transporting it to the market, and then selling it on at a small profit.
She told me about the night she found her teenage daughter trying to sneak out of the house while the family slept. It turns out that she had been offered 5,000 shillings (just under US$4) to carry buffalo meat.
To put this in context, this is a deal more than a man can earn in a day doing hard manual labour, working on a building site for instance.
You see, we live on the edge of Arusha National Park, a tiny gem nestled on the forested flanks of Mount Meru, Kilimanjaro’s spectacular twin. The land here is fertile and well-watered, good agricultural land, and the Meru people farm it. Small plots are intensively tilled right up to the park boundary. And there’s no fence. So, every year as the crops - maize, bananas, sugar cane etc – ripen, elephants and other species move in by night and help themselves. A farmer can lose most of his harvest in a single night in this way. It is scarcely surprising, then, that wild animals are deeply unpopular.
Add to this that it is very difficult for local communities to benefit from tourism – and there, in a nutshell, is the conundrum facing conservation across much of Africa. Game is of no benefit – on the contrary, it is very destructive; tourism revenues seem only to go to outsiders – safari companies, guides, foreign investors; and rangers prevent local people from exploiting their traditional natural resources: food, fuel and medicines from the bush.
Along comes a poacher offering you twice the going rate for your labour… and suddenly bushmeat is the only show in town.
Until we can show that wildlife and wilderness offers local people more benefits - real benefits - than the bushmeat trade (or logging, charcoal, ivory poaching etc), we will continue to haemorrhage our natural resources. And in all probability, we will never understand the value what we’ve lost until it’s all gone.
