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Is There Hope for Conservation in Africa?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

John Cartwright
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science, University of Western Ontario, London.

Extract

The listing of the African elephant in Appendix I to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in late 1989 provided a dramatic indicator of the overwhelming pressures threatening the natural heritage of a number of states in Africa. While both their leaders and international organisations express concern about the longterm environmental stability of many areas, the more immediate economic difficulties in producing enough food and obtaining sufficient foreign exchange to finance essential imports and service debts mean that effective conservation measures have been largely neglected.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 The international community's official view of the economic crisis, the World Bank's Sub-Saharan Africa: from crisis to sustainable growth (Washington, D.C., 1989),Google Scholar scarcely mentions environmental degradation in its litany of problems. Cf. more ‘ecological’ perspectives, such as Lloyd, Timberlake, Africa in Crisis: the causes, the cures of environmental bankruptcy (London, 1988).Google Scholar

2 Some people might still argue that the western industrialised states have disrupted almost all their natural eco-systems and managed to prosper by doing so. However, it is coming to be recognised today that their extensive ‘mining’ of timber and high-input, soil-depleting agricultural practices are simply not sistainable over more than a few more decades, as even the very cautious, middle-of-the-road Bruntland report makes clear. See the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford and New York, 1987).Google ScholarPubMed

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12 I have serious reservations about the arguments advanced by several contributors to David, Anderson and Richard, Grove (eds.), Conservation in Africa: people, policies and practice (Cambridge, 1987),Google Scholar that local people can be left to co-exist with wildlife as they have always done, taking some animals for ‘bushmeat’ or ceremonial uses, but not wiping out the breeding stock. By way of contrast, Kjekshus, Helge, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History (London, 1977), pp. 70–8, documents the paucity of observable wildlife in the region during the nineteenth century. Since populations are increasing, as are incentives to acquire cash from the consumptive exploitation of wildlife, humans and wildlife will not co-exist for long in the absence of some formalised system of protection.Google Scholar

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27 The complexities of the interaction between financial incentives and cultural values are discussed with reference to the Maasai and Kenya's Amboseli National Park by David Collet, ‘Pastoralists and Wildlife: image and reality in Kenya Maasailand’, and Linday, W. K., ‘Integrating Parks and Pastoralists: some lessons from Amboseli’, in Anderson, and Grove, (eds.), op. cit. pp. 129–48 and 149–67, respectively.Google Scholar

28 Hedlund, Stefan and Lundahl, Mats, Ideology as a Determinant of Economic Systems: Nyerere and Ujamaa in Tanzania (Uppsala, 1989), pp. 3441.Google Scholar