USAid pushes Zimbabwean “wise use” wildlife management model in Kenya
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2004:
HARARE, NAIROBI–The future of wildlife in Zimbabwe and
Kenya may depend on the outcome of the November 2004 U.S.
Presidential election–or may be decided sooner, as officials in a
position to cash in on consumptive use rush to do it.
U.S. President George W. Bush brought to the White House a
renewed commitment to the wildlife policies of his father George H.
Bush and Ronald Reagan.
Echoing the “sustainable use” rhetoric of the World Wildlife
Fund and African Wildlife Foundation, all three Presidents have
actually been more closely aligned with the Competitive Enterprise
Institute and Safari Club International–and none more so than George
W., who was the Safari Club “Governor of the Year” in 1999 for
vetoing a Texas bill to restrain canned hunts.
Operative assumptions of the George W. Bush administration
African wildlife policy, are that wildlife should pay its own way;
that trophy hunting is the best ecological and economic use for large
wildlife; that breeding huntable populations of wildlife in
captivity is an acceptable alternative to protecting habitat; that
conservation is best motivated by profit rather than altruism; and
that his Republican forebears knew what they were doing, since none
of the Big Five trophy species–African elephant, rhino, lion,
leopard, and Cape buffalo–went extinct on their watch.
The Center for Private Conservation, a Competitive
Enterprise Institute subsidiary, touted Zimbabwe as the showplace
for successful “wise use” wildlife policy during the 2000 U.S.
election campaign. Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, an avowed
Marxist just a few years earlier, seduced the Reagan and George H.
Bush administrations by turning conservation over almost entirely to
the private sector.