TZ against trophy ban

Dar es Salaam. Tanzania is appealing to the US government to drop its ban on sport-hunted trophies from the country. Authorities here say the decision was made in haste.

Speaking for the first time with The Sunday Citizen since the ban on April 4, Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism Lazaro Nyalandu said: “We want to speak with the US government to reverse the ban since it will be harmful to wildlife conservation in Tanzania. The government has started a process of holding talks with the US authorities, and I am ready to travel to the US for talks.”

He was speaking on the sidelines of a two-day conference on stopping wildlife crime and advancing wildlife conservation which ended yesterday in Dar es Salaam. In its decision on April 4, 2014, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) said the ban had been imposed because elephants in Tanzania and Zimbabwe faced an uncertain future. Questionable management practices, poor law enforcement and weak governance have resulted in uncontrolled poaching and catastrophic population declines in Tanzania, said the USFWS.

Mr Nyalandu argues that the ban will adversely affect wildlife conservation in Tanzania since 65 per cent of conservation funds are derived from tourist hunting. According to the minister, the USFWS made its decision based on the elephant population in the Selous Game Reserve and not the entire country--which paints a totally different picture.

The elephant population status in the Selous-Mikumi and Ruaha-Rungwa Ecosystems-Census Results of 2013 report, launched in Dar es Salaam recently, indicates that only 13,084 elephants are left in the Mikumi-Selous ecosystems.

The minister said the USFWS imposed a similar ban on Kenya some years back but, contrary to expectations, elephant poaching surged in that country’s national parks.

Last month, a US-based hunting and conservation organisation with over 30,000 members worldwide went to court to challenge the USFWS. The group said USFWS issued the ban without consulting the nations affected or the hunters impacted.

Safari Club International (SCI) said in the lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia that sport hunting employs approximately 3,700 people in Tanzania and supports over 88,000 families.

Furthermore, the group said, the revenue accrued from sport hunting provides local communities with conservation resources and incentives and discourages poaching.

“The loss of this revenue could be devastating to elephant survival,” said the SCI in the lawsuit made available to The Citizen.

The SCI’s suit attacks the inadequacy of information on which the USFWS based its decision and the failure to consider the beneficial impacts that US hunters and sport hunting have on African elephant conservation, including the economic deterrent to poaching that is funded by hunters.

Reacting to the SCI lawsuit, the Chairman of Tanzania Professional Hunters Association (TPHA), Mr Mohsin Abdallah, said: “We support the action taken by SCI because USFWS took a unilateral action without consulting stakeholders and especially the Tanzania and Zimbabwe governments.”

TPHA is affiliated with SCI and is a member of Safari Club Foundation, an organisation specialising in wildlife conservation and sustainable utilisation in eastern, central and southern Africa.

Although USFWS claims that the ban is aimed at protecting the elephants, Mr Abdallah says, the move will lead to a drop in finances--and this will have a knock-on effect on all other wildlife and the environment interests as poaching will rise if the safari outfitters have no clients in the hunting blocks. “The reduction in tourist hunting clients in the hunting blocks, especially in the buffer zones close to national parks, will result in poaching in the parks,” the TPHA boss says. “The ban will be counterproductive if the intention of the advocacy campaign is for the community to value its natural resources.”

The secretary general of Tanzania Hunting Operators Association (Tahoa), Mr Mohamed Abdulkadir, says the lawsuit is good news. He believes the ban will not help because the number of elephants taken as hunting trophies has no effect on the overall population. “After all, elephants that are legally hunted for sport trophies are aged over 50 years,” said Mr Abdulkadir.

And SCI President Craig Kauffman had this to say: “SCI acted swiftly to develop this lawsuit to correct the errors in the importation ban decision as well as the harm that the bans will cause to elephant conservation. African elephant hunting is an excellent example of how US hunters can make a powerfully positive contribution to the conservation of a species.”

According to Mr Kauffman, the US Congress and USFWS have repeatedly acknowledged that poachers are the threat to elephant conservation and that hunters offer a solution.