Choosing management approaches - Conservation and Sustainable Use - page 220

Crisis Task Force's goal is to 'eliminate the illegal commercial bushmeat trade...' [our
italics]; BCTF, n.d.). In Sarawak, Malaysia, government action to ban the commercial
sale of wild meat was welcomed by local people, who feared the loss of their
subsistence livelihoods (Tisen et al . 1999). But evidence from the Democratic
Republic of Congo shows that very poor people often rely on bushmeat sales as one of
the few accessible sources of cash, needed to buy cheaper foodstuffs and for expenses
such as school fees and medical care (de Merode et al . 2004). In what way, then, would
it be more ethical to stop the use of bushmeat as a source of cash, rather than food?

6.3.4 Payment for conservation services
This involves paying people directly for their contribution to conservation. The
steps are:

Calculate value of
resource OR cost
of conservation

Indentify
conservation
service providers

Draw up conservation
contract to pay for
services

Individuals actively
conserve according
to contract

The underlying philosophy is that by conserving, or not using, natural resources,
individuals are incurring costs. Active conservation has direct costs, and refraining
from use has opportunity costs. However, the majority of the benefits from
conservation are accruing to others, particularly to those who value nature and
wish it to be conserved. There is a need to balance the costs and benefits of conser-
vation, so that those of us who benefit from conservation pay its true costs, and
those who are bearing the costs are compensated (Norton-Griffiths and Southey
1995; Balmford and Whitten 2003). Supporting alternative livelihoods can be
seen as compensation for opportunity costs, and supporting regulated use of the
resource is offsetting active management costs. However, some argue that these
approaches are economically inefficient and difficult to implement successfully—
a better approach would be to directly compensate people for the costs they incur
in conserving their local resources (Ferraro 2001; Ferraro and Kiss 2002).
The scope of this approach is broad, and growing rapidly. It encompasses a range
of mechanisms from competitions with cash prizes, through contracts with
landowners to manage their land for conservation, to quota trading schemes. The
unifying theme is that the value of the actions of individuals who can directly
influence conservation outcomes are recognised and financially rewarded. The
approach is analogous to the single farm payments introduced by the European
Union in 2003, breaking the link between agricultural production and subsidies, in
order that farm payments could be given specifically for farmers' costs in providing
social goods such as biodiversity conservation (European Commission 2003). In
Australia, conservation auctions are being piloted, whereby farmers bid for funding
to carry out conservation on their land (Gole et al . 2005). The most famous
developing country scheme is in Costa Rica, where government has entered into
conservation contracts with landowners, in a Payments for Environmental Services
Program designed to reduce forest clearance (Zbinden and Lee 2005).