SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 167

Their small holdings keep shrinking as the population grows and the plots are divided and
subdivided. They want the land inside the parks or they want some of the rewards they be-
lieve they deserve from the parks.
Namugala refereed some of these discussions. She also appealed to the foreigners in
attendance for understanding and aid. Zambia is sometimes given money for issues that
are not the government's priority, she said, and not for what they need. One of the coun-
try's biggest expenses is the cost of maintaining nineteen national parks and thirty-six game
management areas. She mentioned high-level negotiations with the United States to refur-
bish the country's largest park in central Zambia. The request was later denied because the
government couldn't prove the park would make economic sense in and of itself, which is
not the primary reason for preservation of national parks whether in Zambia or the United
States.
So Zambia has fallen back on the biggest, quickest money-earner—selling licenses to
kill the animals. It is one of the few African nations that still allow hunting and it charges
high trophy fees to foreigners: $10,000 for a hippo and $60,000 for an elephant. Sport
and trophy hunting have been part of conservation in Africa for decades. This is called
“consumptive” revenue and it has come under close scrutiny. There are disputes about its
value.
Namugala said that “sustainable hunting earns us 85 percent of our tourism revenues.”
A World Bank study by Adam Pope said there was not enough reliable data to confirm
Namugala's claim. His data showed that non hunting activities surrounding visits to nature
parks, including the Victoria Falls, are responsible for the majority of tourism revenue.
One of the conclusions was critical of “an element of short-term opportunism in niche
ventures.” Animal rights groups argue that the trophy hunters kill more animals than ne-
cessary to cull herds and they are depleting the stock.
Then there are the complaints from local communities that question whether they re-
ceive their share of the bounty from foreign hunters. In theory, local communities are sup-
posed to receive half of revenues from the park and game preserve revenues, with the other
half going to ZAWA, the wildlife authority. By local communities, the government gener-
ally means the subsistence farmers who live in the buffer zone around the parks, which are
generally unfenced. Often these subsistence farmers do not receive their promised share, a
common problem around the world. In dozens of studies of native people who have been
moved off their land to create conservation areas, the benefits of these new areas go to
people who did not make the sacrifices.
While there is no single formula for getting it right, governments like Botswana, Nam-
ibia and South Africa have provided fair compensation through coordination of conserva-
tion and tourism, including hunting. The Zambian government has fallen down on plan-
ning and making routine public accounting of how the park revenues have been distrib-
uted, making it impossible to know whether corrupt officials have funneled large sums of