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Heartbreak on the Serengeti
FEBRUARY 2006
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| Heartbreak on the Serengeti (continued) |
By Robert M. Poole
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Photographs by Randy Olson
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To the Maasai it's the place where the land runs on forever, but beyond the protected core of this iconic landscape, the land is running out.
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Twenty years ago, when the pressures of population were less, few Serengeti scientists worried unduly about poaching. "It would not be correct to call killing an antelope or zebra or wildebeest to feed one's family meat poaching," said Markus Borner, the Frankfurt Zoological Society's top scientist in the region, interviewed for a National Geographic article in 1986. Now, however, with the market for wild meat flourishing in Africa, villagers around the park can make more money by hunting in the Serengeti than they can by almost any other activity, so the annual harvest of animals in the ecosystem has risen dramatically in recent years. Because hunting is illegal, precise figures are hard to come by. Estimates of the poaching toll range from a low of 40,000 animals a year to a high of 200,000, most of them wildebeests. Such a harvest cannot be sustained at the higher figure without causing fundamental damage to the ecosystem.
"You can only remove so many nuts out of an airplane before it falls out of the sky and crashes," said Rian Labuschagne, managing director of the Grumeti Reserves, an enterprise that recently leased almost 280,000 acres (110,000 hectares) of hunting concessions in the western Serengeti to restore the beleaguered ecosystem from the outside in.
Bankrolled by Paul Tudor Jones, a futures trader and visionary American conservationist, the Grumeti Reserves project has already invested at least 20 million dollars in Tanzania to conserve vital migratory habitat in the western corridor; to crack down on illegal hunting by indigenous Africans; and to help struggling villages outside the park by building schools, drilling new wells, providing scholarships, creating tourist jobs, and training farmers in beekeeping and aquaculture—all aimed at weaning citizens away from poaching.
How to pay for this ambitious scheme? Easy: You build one of the world's most exclusive safari lodges on a bluff overlooking the sweeping Sabora Plains, fill the lodge with Victorian antiques and millionaires, charge the high rollers $1,500 a night, and collect additional trophy fees when they go out to hunt for lions and buffalo. You coddle guests with a health spa, two tennis courts, a yoga room, a state-of-the-art exercise facility, and gourmet meals by a Cypriot chef. You build an infinity pool on the edge of the bluff, affording a panoramic view for those who like to soak while watching their wildebeests. You make the experience special by banning anyone except paying guests from your private preserve.
After operating costs are covered, any excess from the Grumeti Reserves goes to a subsidiary known as the Grumeti Fund, which will pour its resources into community development and security.
"We dream a bit wide," said Labuschagne, a bluff South African with an unstoppable conversational style that leaves visitors gasping in his wake. We chatted in the welcome shade of a massive acacia on a July morning, as workers put the finishing touches on Sasakwa Lodge. This gleaming 18-bed centerpiece of the Grumeti resort had just received its first guests, which he marks as a turning point for conservation in Tanzania.
"We are taking care of this world-class resource and creating something that will be sustainable for the next hundred years," said Labuschagne, a veteran conservationist who earned his spurs restoring black rhinos in Ngorongoro Crater. "We want to bring the millionaires like Ted Turner in here and squeeze as much money out of them as we can. The more money we squeeze out of them, the more we will put back into the community, so that people in the villages can finally have some money in their pockets. They have to get something out of it too."
It remains to be seen whether the big spending of Paul Tudor Jones, combined with the big ideas of Rian Labuschagne, will succeed in Tanzania. Conservationists are cautiously optimistic that they will.
"All of these transitional zones around the park are supposed to accommodate both people and wildlife," said Christiane Schelten. "So far the buffer zones have worked better on paper than they have in reality." At least some conservationists view the Grumeti scheme as a positive alternative to the failed approaches of the past. "A lot of people think that trophy hunting is a horrible thing," she said. "But as long as it's sustainable and you have the right quotas in place, it can be a money earner for the local economy, and with no harm to the resource."
Not everyone, however, is enamored with the grand vision laid out by Labuschagne and company. In Robanda, a scruffy but vibrant village of 2,763 just outside the western gates of Serengeti National Park, any mention of the Grumeti scheme provokes a sharp response.
"We are their enemy, and they are our enemy!" said Kenyatta Richard Mosaka, the village vice chairman. Like others in his town, Mosaka views the Grumeti people as meddlesome outsiders who want to move them far away, where Robanda's fiercely independent Ikoma people will not interfere with the resort's luxury safaris.
And indeed, this is exactly what Labuschagne would like to do. He supports plans by the Tanzanian government for the Ikoma Wildlife Management Area, which would severely limit hunting, farming, and other human activity in a 96,000-acre (39,000-hectare) wedge surrounding the village.
"Robanda remains the problem," he said. "You've got human activity cutting a wedge out of an ecosystem there." He believes that the village has become a hotbed of the bush-meat trade, and there is independent research to support this view. He also asserts that the town is an obstacle to wildebeest migration in the western migratory corridor.
To remove this barrier, Grumeti has offered to lease village lands and relocate Robanda's citizens. Robandans would retain ownership of their old lands, and they would have a say in management of the new wildlife area—but they could no longer live there. "Their land would become more valuable with time," said Labuschagne.
Mosaka snorts at this suggestion. "They want to ban us from hunting," he said. "They say that our village interrupts the migration of the wildebeests. Why are there more wildebeests now than ever before? They offered to pay us to move. Our village rejected the offer. Now the people here see a white man and they get angry."
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