Dion George’s ‘non-partisan’ conservation push is partisan in practice: Ivo Vegter

Key topics:Dion George launches “Conservation Trust,” claims non-partisan stance.Criticism: George lacks conservation experience, holds partisan views.South Africa’s private game model outperforms state-controlled systems..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ivo Vegter*.Fired environment minister Dion George launched a new conservation initiative to advance his activist agenda.Not three months since being booted out of government, Dion George has resurfaced as the inaugural executive chairman of the newly-launched global NGO, the Conservation Trust.The organisation appears to exist only on the Facebook page of “Save the Beasts. Stop the Slaughter,” run by one Simon Bloch, a freelance environmental journalist of the hysterical end-is-nigh variety.He describes the Conservation Trust as “a last gasp in the dying light of South Africa’s wildlife wars, above an AI-generated picture of an ark carrying five rhinos, four lions, three giraffes, two elephants, and a single misshapen goat.There are many “conservation trusts”, including an African one and a Southern African one, but no website for a newly-launched “Conservation Trust” without adjectives is discoverable by mortal means.The domains conservationtrust.com and conservationtrust.org have not been registered. (And I’m not saying go register those domains for your hunting farm or your sustainable use lobby group. That would be rude.)In Don Pinnock’s article on curious George’s big adventure, he writes: “Officially, the organisation brands itself as nonpartisan. Politically, detractors might treat the launch as something else…”Pinnock is not always right, but this time he certainly is. Detractors will indeed treat the launch as something else, because it is.“Non-partisan”The organisation is not at all non-partisan. Much further down the article, Pinnock quotes George: “I will not support a model in which wildlife becomes simply a financial asset to be exploited. In South Africa, John Steenhuisen pressured me to see wildlife policy through an economic lens – and I rejected it. I would have been haunted for the rest of my life if I had enabled policies, I considered detrimental to wildlife.”.Read more:.How hunting actually saved South Africa’s wildlife: Ivo Vegter.This is an explicitly partisan position statement, which takes one side of perhaps the most important policy disagreement in conservation: between radical environmentalists who view animals as having inherent rights independent of human interests, and practical conservationists who subscribe to the widely-accepted principle of sustainable use.International conservation and biodiversity treaties, the South African Constitution, and domestic environmental law are all clear: wildlife, and other natural resources, are to be used in service of economic and social development, provided such use is sustainable (i.e. it does not threaten the survival of any species, and does not preclude future use of the resource in question).That he took this unconstitutional, unscientific position is exactly why I wrote at the time that George had to go.“Deeply experienced”Bloch describes George as “deeply experienced in environmental governance”.That will come as a surprise to conservationists, given that George has a financial services background, and appears to have had nothing to do with environmental governance before being appointed environment minister in March 2024, a job which he held for exactly 20 months.Less than two years’ experience isn’t even enough to get your first job after school, these days. It certainly doesn’t count as “deep experience”.George makes a common mistake, shared by many urban elites who think they understand conservation because they holiday in National Parks once in a while. That mistake is to assume that commercial use of wildlife encourages illegal wildlife trade, and is ipso facto, “detrimental to wildlife”.Pinnock says George “argued that trafficking networks overlap with other criminal flows – ‘weapons, drugs, people and money’ – operating through what he calls the same set of pipes.”All those things (bar money itself) are things in which legal trade is explicitly prohibited, or made prohibitively hard. If you ban alcohol, or cigarettes, or you tax them excessively, you also get black market trade controlled by criminal cartels.If something is not legally available, or is very expensive or hard to obtain legally, then simple supply and demand dictates that prices will rise, and demand will be satisfied by illegal means.Refusing to consider wildlife as assets, as George does, is exactly why illegal wildlife trade networks arise in the first place.If George claims to be “deeply experienced in environmental governance”, he ought to be aware of the contrast between South Africa and Kenya. Where the latter banned big game hunting in 1977 and now has almost no game left, South Africa has seen tremendous growth in game numbers and land under game since it established private property rights in game and permitted private hunting.If George claims to be “deeply experienced in environmental governance”, he ought to be aware of the contrast between the South African Conservation Model, which permits private ownership of game, and that of North America, which considers game to be communal property, and markets inherently destructive to wildlife.Scientifically speaking, he is not only partisan, but wrong.Tragedy of the commonsThe reason the wildlife exploitation narrative is mistaken is that a critical factor is left out of the explanation.In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a professor of biology at the University of Santa Barbara, California, wrote a seminal article in the journal Science, in which he described the tragedy of the commons.His example involved communal pasture, in which a small farming population could freely use it without detrimental effects, but as the population increased, so did over-grazing.Each farmer had an incentive to graze more animals on the commons, because the benefit to each of doing so was greater than the cost, which was shared among all.Ultimately, the perverse incentives of common ownership led to the destruction of the commons.The same is true for hunting wildlife that is held in common. Every hunter has an incentive to hunt, because the profit of doing so exceeds the cost of declining populations, which is shared among all would-be hunters.As Hardin wrote, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”Now there are two ways to resolve the problem of the tragedy of the commons. The first is to use state coercion to limit access to the commons. The second is to establish private property rights on what was formerly the commons.Common ownershipThe idea of the state as the sole owner of nature lies at the root of the North American Model of wildlife conservation, based on doctrines established by the avid hunter and naturalist, president Theodore Roosevelt.Roosevelt strongly believed in the right of all citizens to hunt for recreation. This principle was known as the “democracy of hunting”, or the “democracy of sport”. The problem was that uncontrolled hunting was leading to the extinction of species.The Roosevelt Doctrine of Conservation recognised the “conservation through wise use” of “outdoor resources” as a public responsibility and their ownership as a public trust.Much like the Soviets thought about their economy, it advocated a scientifically-informed technocracy as a tool for discharging that responsibility. Communism is alive and well in North America.The model of conservation that developed in the US and Canada is based on the concept that wildlife is owned by no one and is held in trust for the benefit of present and future generations by government.Like George, it holds that markets for wildlife and wildlife products are, with few exceptions, unacceptable because they privatise a common resource and lead to population declines.The policy also has a curious view on hunting: wildlife may be killed only for a “legitimate purpose”.Now one might think that hunting for the pot would be a legitimate purpose, but it is not. Neither is hunting for the fun of killing, nor is hunting for profit.The only form of hunting that is deemed acceptable is sport hunting, where the hunter does so primarily for the pursuit or chase, affords game a “sporting” chance, inflicts no unnecessary pain or suffering on game, seeks knowledge of nature and the habits of animals, derives no financial profit from game killed, and will not waste any game that is killed.How exactly you don’t waste game that is killed without either hunting for the pot or hunting for profit is a mystery. I suppose you’re supposed to hunt for other people’s pots, and do so for free.Limited successThe North American Conservation Model has had only limited success.As one might imagine, when everything is subject to centralised, bureaucratic planning, you get shortages and surpluses.Some wildlife continued to decline, while others, like white-tailed deer and coyotes, grew into outright pests.Because everyone has an inherent right to enjoy nature, overcrowding in National Parks is causing untold damage to both wildlife and the environment.While American wildlife managers will tell you about the successes of the North American Model, they glibly overlook the fact that its failures led to the rise of a parallel field of study, conservation biology, which calls itself a “crisis discipline”.The Public Trust Doctrine on which the North American Model is based is being assailed from two sides. On one side is the rise of private game farms raising wildlife for sale or hunting.On the other are attempts to address the shortcomings of the North American Model by moving even further towards communal ownership of wildlife, and rejecting recreational hunting as a minority interest that no longer plays an important role in conservation in the 21st century.This is the side on which I’d imagine Dion George would be, if he were North American.This democratisation of conservation is being driven largely by animal rights organisations, which oppose all productive use of wildlife as a matter of principle. Under this model, even soccer moms and urban hipsters – especially soccer moms and urban hipsters – get a say in how wildlife is managed.Apparently unaware of the inherent contradictions of their philosophy, they argue that whether or not citizens will continue to have free access to enjoy wildlife, whether governments will preserve biodiversity for future generations, and whether wildlife will remain wild, depends on the extent to which people are aware of their innate share in the ownership of wildlife, and in their shared responsibility for it.But if you have a share in the ownership of wildlife, why don’t you have a share in the revenues they produce? Why can’t you hunt for the pot, or for profit? Why can’t you sell your share of wildlife? What is the meaning of ownership if you cannot buy, trade or sell that which you own?And whose responsibility is commonly-owned wildlife exactly? That of the government, or of the people as a whole? If it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s responsibility, as the tragedy of the commons teaches us.The problems of overexploitation and extinction of wildlife have always derived from their being treated as a common property. And the North American Conservation Model tries to solve this problem by… treating wildlife as a common property.Private ownershipThe second way to resolve the tragedy of the commons is to establish private property rights in wildlife.Garrett Hardin himself recognised that the tragedy of the commons, to which the US national parks system was subject, could be prevented by selling them off as private property.He also recognised that the tragedy of the commons in food production is averted by private property, or something very much like it.He admitted so grudgingly, it might be added, because he was a Marxist, and considered the institution of private property to be unjust in principle, but he held injustice to be preferable to the total ruin of the commons.South Africa has followed this second route, turning a great deal of wildlife over to the private sector.Operation RhinoThe origin of the South African Model of wildlife conservation lies in Operation Rhino, led by Ian Player, the one-time warden of the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve.The white rhino had been on the brink of extinction. In 1900, only 20 specimens survived. By the middle of the century, the situation was not much better.Player started to select breeding groups of white rhinos from Hluhluwe-Umfolozi in the 1950s and 1960s, and exported them to other game reserves, as well as to private game farms and zoos.This successfully re-established white rhino populations around the country.The Natal Parks, Game and Fish Preservation Board (now known as Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife) would sell rhinos to private game farms for a nominal fee, where they would then be hunted.The first white rhino trophy hunt took place in 1972. By the mid-1980s, however, it was apparent that there was a problem with this model: all the rhinos that went to private game farms were promptly hunted.The Parks Board despaired of private game ranches ever contributing to the breeding and conservation of rhinos.There were two reasons for this. In 1982, the list price for a white rhino was R1,000. A trophy hunt brought in R6,000. Nobody in their right mind would bother breeding rhinos if they could make a quick 600% profit without much effort, and nobody did.The Natal Parks Board doubled, and then trebled the list price, but with little effect. In 1985, however, private game owners put the first rhinos on auction. Inspired, the Natal Parks Board did the same in 1986.The auctioned rhino fetched R10,000, far more than the list price. Market prices soared, and by 1989, a rhino was worth R49,000. By 1990, the margin on a trophy hunt had declined from 600% to 60%.Private property rightsOn its own, this wasn’t enough to change the dynamic, but another critical thing happened. Before 1991, all wildlife in South Africa was treated by law as res nullius. That is, game could not be privately owned.In that year, however, the South African Law Commission drafted a new law, the Theft of Game Act of 1991. This Act established private ownership of any game animals that could be legally identified by means such as a brand or ear tag.The combination of secure private property rights and market pricing were all the incentive private game ranchers needed. It now made financial sense to breed rhino, and hunt them only selectively. (Or, as George would say, rhinos were now “a financial asset to be exploited”.)White rhino numbers began to grow more strongly, from fewer than 6,000 in 1991 to a peak of 21,000.Coinciding with a moratorium on the domestic sale or trade of rhino horns, imposed in 2009, poaching escalated dramatically. The vast majority of the poaching occurred in state-owned National Parks, which follow the conservation policy that George advocates.Even though poaching has slashed the white rhino population to about 17,500, it is no longer considered endangered or even threatened.Black rhinoNow compare that with the population of black rhino, most of which occurred outside South Africa’s borders, where they were largely commonly owned, and managed by governments.While white rhino numbers were recovering, the black rhino population crashed from about 100,000 in 1960 to just 2,300 in 1993, except in South Africa, whose small population increased..Read more:.Give wildlife value and it flourishes; deny it value and it vanishes.Much of the the recent recovery in the black rhino population, to about 6,500 animals, can be attributed to South Africa’s conservation model, which is also applied in Namibia with its strong emphasis on private game ownership.The private sector in South Africa now protects more rhinos than there are rhinos in the whole of the rest of Africa combined.Other gameThe success of private-sector conservation is not limited to rhino. In 1965, game was practically extinct outside National Parks.Today, the government has about six million hectares, or 5% of South Africa’s land area, dedicated to National Parks and state-run nature reserves, supporting some six million head of game.The private industry has three or four times as much land under game, mostly on marginal agricultural land. There is now more than three times as much wildlife on private land as there is on state-protected land.What’s more, private game ranches are largely funded by hunting. Only 5% of their revenues comes from eco-tourism, and many game farms couldn’t fund themselves from tourism simply because they’re not scenically located, or far off the beaten tourist trail.Acting to limit or ban hunting, and the legal trade in wildlife products that it enables, will pull the rug from under South Africa’s thousands of game farms, turning them from profit centres into cost centres at the stroke of a pen. And once they become cost centres, most of these land-owners will be forced to reconsider the viability of maintaining a mostly natural landscape carrying wildlife, and replace it with livestock or crop farming, instead.“More effective”Private game ranches are not the be-all and end-all of conservation, of course.Although many agree to bring down fences between them to enlarge the areas accessible to game, most remain small and fragmented compared to the relative handful of large National Parks.That means far more active management is required on private ranches to maintain healthy ecosystems with a good balance between carnivores and herbivores, and between herbivores and plants. And not all game ranches do this.Environmentalists of Dion George’s ilk scoff at game ranching, arguing that it contributes little, if anything to true conservation. But that is elitist snobbery.Game ranches might not be as large, pristine or diverse as National Parks, but they play a key role in keeping land under game and increasing wildlife populations.A study in 2014 by three American scholars concluded that the South African Conservation Model outperformed the North American Conservation Model.They found that it was more likely to reintroduce and conserve small, nonviable wildlife populations, reintroduce and conserve top-level predators, have more intensive management of wildlife, manage wildlife in partnership across multiple landowners, engage local communities, be self-funding, and restrict visitor movement.They concluded: “The South African model is arguably more effective in conserving biodiversity as measured by conservation of apex predators and natural processes.”Policy toolkitsAccording to Pinnock, Dion George says that his new organisation will “equip legislators, regulators and senior officials with ‘credible, evidence-based education, practical policy toolkits’”.Perhaps he can start with the evidence that the South African Conservation Model, based upon private property rights, legal trade in wildlife products, private hunting revenue, outperforms models in which wildlife is communally owned and hunting is strictly controlled by the state.And perhaps he can base his “policy toolkits” on the sustainable use principles that are baked into the Constitution, conservation law and biodiversity treaties.But don’t count on it. Because Dion George is not non-partisan. He is a partisan activist, of the most dangerous, self-righteous kind.He does not have actual conservation experience. His experience appears to be limited to reading opinion pieces written for the urban elites by “journalists” who base their views on emotions and aren’t even aware that South Africa’s game is actually thriving, let alone having the faintest clue why this is so.“Non-partisan” my foot..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Dion George’s ‘non-partisan’ conservation push is partisan in practice: Ivo Vegter

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