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South Africa is proposing to allow tourists to use rhino horn powder within its borders for its purported medicinal effects as part of a broader strategy designed to extract more economic value from the country’s wildlife.
The government is also pushing for a six-fold increase in consumption of game meat, such as antelope, to 28 billion rand ($1.5 billion) by 2036, and a similar increase to 11.6 billion rand in plant trading and bioprospecting, which involves the use of plants for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
The revamped 10-year plan, known as the National Biodiversity Economy Strategy, envisions particular financial benefits for black communities historically excluded from white-dominated wildlife and conservation industries.
It will include the expansion of game farming and hunting on communal and traditionally held lands. Another goal is to increase the amount of land set aside for conservation from 20 million acres to 34 million acres by 2040, while allowing primarily Black communities to benefit economically.
Barbara Creecy, the environment minister, told the Financial Times that the proposals were a way of ensuring that “people in rural areas have an incentive to conserve”. If poorer South Africans living around game reserves were simply excluded, some would resort to land invasion and poaching, she said.
Annette Hübschle, a wildlife conservation expert at the University of Cape Town, said the proposals challenge what she calls a “fences and fines” approach to conservation that was partly a legacy of apartheid. She said the strategy looked “attractive on paper, but the test of fact will be whether it translates into workable solutions”.
South Africa is home to around 80% of the world’s wild rhinos, including some black rhinos classified as “critically endangered”. Creecy said 450 rhinos were killed last year.
The controversial plan acknowledges international support for banning trade in rhino horn and elephant tusk under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), but says South Africa should explore “innovative approaches” to domestic trade.
The strategic document foresees the possibility of initiatives such as “health clinics to administer traditional remedies using rhino horn for medical tourists from the Far East, or ivory carving done locally for local sale and export for use staff”.
The plan, which has been approved by South Africa’s cabinet but is subject to public consultation before its implementation, has sharply divided opinion.
Creecy said she wasn’t sure the rhino horn proposal would “survive the public comment process.” There is a potential contradiction, she admitted, between South Africa’s position that rhino horn has no medicinal properties and her proposal to market it for medical tourism.
Rhino horn is made up of keratin, the same protein that contributes to the formation of human hair, nails and skin. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is believed to be a cure for fever and snake bites, and more recently, it has also been proposed as a treatment for some forms of cancer.
Critics have branded South Africa’s plan a crude form of “extractive conservation” and say it applies an “agricultural ethic” to wild animals. Don Pinnock, a professor of criminology, said in an article in the Daily Maverick that the emphasis on “consumer use” and game hunting risks allowing “poaching to be recycled within the legal framework.”
But there was also strong support. Wandile Sihlobo, a professor of agricultural economics at Stellenbosch University, said: “What the government is saying is: ‘Let’s give communities an economic incentive to look after these lands and assets.’ Having a pristine environment and people going hungry is not right. We have to find a balance.”
Sihlobo added that a large stock of horns was created mainly from rhinos that had been cut down to discourage poaching. “We have spent decades fighting poachers, so we should be open to this economic solution,” she said.
Kevin Leo-Smith, director of Rhino Revolution, which supports “any positive approach” to conservation, including the sustainable use of rhino horn from live animals, said the overall biodiversity strategy was an important step in implementing of an economic lens to conservation.
The medical tourism component is “creative,” he added, stressing that the key is to make “a live rhino worth more than a dead one.”