The growing spectre of Africa without wildlife

Deutsch accepted the study’s argument that the wildlife decline is due in part to bad design and siting of national parks, which often include only a fraction of the migratory range of major species. But that doesn’t explain, he said, why the largest parks in the study suffered the worst declines, while some small parks actually showed increases. He dismissed the study’s rosy assessment of the security provided by KWS, and blamed poaching across the border from Somalia for the 78 per cent decline in Meru and the 63 per cent decline in Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks.

Deutsch also noted that the study implicitly re-plays a dispute that has raged in Kenyan wildlife circles for 30 years, “often generating more heat than light”. On one side, Western pushes his community-involvement approach. On the other, Richard Leakey, another former KWS director, argues for “fences-and-fines”.

“For me, the world is complicated,” said Deutsch, adding that he’d be interested in a study “that doesn’t have an axe to grind from the start”. He rattled off a series of challenges to the survival of wildlife in Kenya - badly-flawed parks, little or no benefits flowing to people living around parks, a lack of income from legal trophy hunting and other consumptive uses of wildlife, the bushmeat trade, political corruption, inadequate protection against poachers - and suggested that in any given situation, either Western’s approach or Leakey’s might be the right way to go.

Soon after the new study appeared, a columnist in Swara, the East African Wildlife Society quarterly, took the entire Kenyan conservation establishment, including Western and Leakey both, sharply to task: “The cosy pretence that all is well within Kenya’s Protected Areas has been simply blown out of the water ... Have the courage to admit that everything you have recommended, supported, funded and implemented over the last 30 years in Kenya to conserve wildlife has been a failure - or was it your intention to sit idly by while some 70 per cent of wildlife vanished from under your very noses?”

Yet the prospects for reversing this grim trend seem small. The human population of sub-Saharan Africa continues to boom, with a projected increase of a billion more people across the continent by 2050. So both fences and community-friendly approaches will almost certainly need to work - along with some miraculous remedy still to be devised - if Africa’s rich and potentially lucrative wildlife legacy is to last through this century.