News

As promised, we are now further exploring the topic we posted here last week – Trophy Hunting as a Wildlife Crime.  

For this report, we only looked closely at Tanzania. But the same issues discussed here equally applies to very many other African nations involved in trophy hunting. However, there is more data available for Tanzania, as more international organisations have collected information from there – while such real information remains as opaque in Tanzania as for any other African nation that allows the wildlife crime of trophy hunting, with associated corrupt practices.

1.      The “legal” money that Tanzania earns from trophy hunting.

 a) Total government income from concessions leased to trophy hunting operators ($60,000 per year for “prime” hunting blocks: Tanzania claims 130 such hunting blocks. More accurate data is 44).

Total – $2,640, 000

b) Total government income from trophy fees:

Based on CITES data from 2023 and currently quoted licence fees charged by hunting operators to their hunting clients.

Lion trophy fees -$308,000 (21 trophies exported in 2023)
Elephant trophy fees - $480,000 (16 trophies exported in 2023)
Leopard trophy fees – 1, 392, 000 (116 trophies exported in 2023)

Total – 2,180,000. Let’s double this speculatively for other species hunted like buffalo, crocodile, hippo, primates, etc = $4,360,000.

c) Total income to Tanzania from trophy hunting (concession and trophy fees) - $7,000,000.

There are some more taxes and fees, like daily fees paid by hunters and observers, PH license, sanitary and vet fees to be allowed to export trophies, maybe Cites permits…

The total should be put in perspective with the global income from tourism, estimated around $ 3 billion. The reader will understand that this 7 to 10 million is totally negligible and insufficient for both wildlife management and community income.

d) The estimated total income is hardly sufficient to support the needs of their wildlife department to properly support biodiversity in their many national parks, community assistance, administration and travel expenses, staff salaries, etc. And hardly sufficient to pay for corrupt politicians and officials. So where do all those extra moneys come from? Misappropriation of foreign aid? Unreliable reporting of trophy exports? Bribes by trophy hunters to allow them to exceed quotas? Depriving communities of money due to them? Engagement with international wildlife crime syndicates to allow illegal exports (over 50,000 elephants poached in Selous Game Reserve alone – without any significant arrests/convictions)? Such questions will likely never be resolved, as the answers are too well hidden by vested interests. Many high-level officials within the ruling CCM party have been named in the Tanzanian media and Parliament in connection with illegal ivory trading. It does not appear that the key corrupt officials implicated in ivory trafficking which led to Tanzania’s elephant poaching crisis have been held accountable or prosecuted.

2. Illegal land grabs facilitated by the Tanzania government

 In the last decades, the Maasai in Tanzania have faced a series of evictions. Starting in 1959, and continuing in 2009, 2013 and 2017, communities were evicted to expand hunting concessions. On June 8, 2022, Tanzanian police and authorities killed a local and arrested and injured many Maasai who were protesting the demarcation of their lands in Loliondo. Unidentified Maasai also killed a police officer in the clash. At least 700 Maasai people fled the region and escaped to bordering Kenya to seek refuge and medical support. “For Maasai, when land is lost, all is lost.” Please read the original reported study here: https://news.mongabay.com/2024/06/forced-evictions-suppress-maasai-spirituality-sacred-spaces-in-tanzania/

 However, in the name of “conservation”, the government has precipitously evicted people and opened spaces for trophy hunting in Ngorongoro. About 150,000 Maasai people have already been evicted across Ngorongoro alone since 2009. Yet the government continues to move ahead with plans to lease the land to the United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based Otterlo Business Company, which organises trophy-hunting trips for the Royal family. OBC has been linked to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the UAE, and, it is reported,  has participated in forcibly evicting Maasai indigenous communities by, among other things, accompanying Tanzanian security forces and allowing the authorities to set up camps on OBC “property” during all forced evictions.

 The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) stated that: “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their land or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after the agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option of return.” Please read the original report here: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/62235/maasai-evictions-in-tanzania

3. Tax evasion by trophy hunting operators:

In Tanzania, Gerard Pasanisi owned shares in at least four companies created by Mossack Fonseca. The first, Gerard Pasanisi Safari Corp., was created in the 1980s and used a Swiss bank account to pay routine bills from Mossack Fonseca. Pasanisi’s string of offshore companies remained active with Mossack Fonseca into 2015. They included a Dubai-based company, Tanganyika Expeditions Ltd., which banked in Switzerland and which and carried out “photographic safaris” in Tanzania. Lawyers for Eric Pasinisi, Gerard Pasanisi’s son and the manager of the businesses, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that the four companies are currently administered from the United Arab Emirates and that their “legal and tax statuses are transparent in both the UAE and Tanzania”. Please read the original report here:  https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160725-safari-tourism-offshore/

 Mossack Fonseca is one of the world’s largest creators of offshore businesses that have few or no employees and are usually located not where the company operates but where taxes are low or secrecy is high. The firm told ICIJ that “we merely help incorporate companies, and before we agree to work with a client in any way, we conduct a thorough due-diligence process, one that in every case meets and quite often exceeds all relevant local rules, regulations and standards.”

 Tourists who come to Africa to view the continent’s beauty may think that their dollars, euros and yen stay in local economies, but this may not always be the case. The activities of some safari companies created by Mossack Fonseca in secrecy-conscious tax havens like the British Virgin Islands concerns transparency advocates and some governments that rely on tourism as a source of official revenue.  Please read the original report here : https://eia-international.org/wp-content/uploads/eia_iwtp-report-tanzania.pdf

4. Trophy hunting effects:

 Researchers in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe found that human activities caused 88% of male and 67% of female lion mortalities between 1999 and 2004. Male lion deaths were dominated by trophy hunting, while the human sources of female lion mortality were more varied and included causes such as unintentional snaring by illegal bushmeat hunters and retaliatory killing by herders for livestock loss. Specifically, 34 of 62 tagged lions died during the study (of which 24 were shot by sport hunters: 13 adult males, 5 adult females, 6 sub-adult males). Sport hunters in the safari areas surrounding the park killed 72% of tagged adult males from the study area. Over 30% of all males shot were sub-adult (<4 years). Hunting off-take of male lions doubled during 2001–2003 compared to levels in the three preceding years, which caused a decline in numbers of adult males in the population (from an adult sex ratio of 1:3 to 1:6 in favour of adult females). Home ranges made vacant by removal of adult males were filled by immigration of males from the park core. Infanticide was observed when new males entered prides. Please read the original report here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320706003843

 Tanzania has seen a significant decrease in male lion trophy hunting, with a 50% drop in lion harvests between 1996 and 2008, according to a 2011 study. This decline was most pronounced in areas with the highest initial trophy hunting pressure and was linked to the intensity of hunting.

Unsustainable hunting quotas: the study found that trophy hunting quotas were too high and unsustainable, leading to sharp declines in hunting blocks where the most lions were initially hunted. Quotas are often set based on guesswork rather than on accurate population estimates, making it difficult to manage hunting effectively. Quotas in Tanzania are supposedly “scientifically determined”. In reality, such quotas are set based on guesswork by the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, the Tanzania Wildlife Authority, and even by the holders of hunting concessions who provide inflated lion numbers and will continue to do so until they are all gone…  Please read the original report here : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30348785/

5. Tanzania ministers involved in corruption:

Corruption has been a long-standing issue in Tanzania, with reports indicating that high-level corruption has hampered economic growth and eroded public trust. In response, the government launched anti-corruption drives and took steps such as sacking ministers and other officials implicated in corruption. However, analyses suggest that despite these efforts, enforcement of anti-corruption legislation has been weak, and high-level officials are rarely prosecuted. Please read the original report here: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal15

 This is especially the case in terms of the UN Sustainable Development Goals 15, which seeks to protect terrestrial ecosystems to halt biodiversity loss. Research shows a clear link between corruption levels and a country’s environmental performance. With the value of environmental crime estimated at up to $258 billion a year, plenty of money is available to criminal syndicates to pay off government officials and politicians to turn a blind eye.

Corrupt politicians, wildlife officials and hunting operators make happy bedfellows to engage in wildlife crimes including setting highly imaginative hunting quotas based on no actual survey data, allowing excess hunting quotas to be taken and exported without hindrance, avoiding any prosecution or arrest, hiding hunting companies’ profits (and therefore tax liabilities) in overseas tax havens, etc. Please read the original report here: https://eia-international.org/blog/love-money-corruption-remains-key-enabler-environmental-crime/

6. What can be done?

a) These incontrovertible data are widely available on the internet. Trophy hunting import nations should be made aware of the destruction corrupt practices wreak on biodiversity, community disempowerment, erosion of public trust of politicians and hunting companies in African nations that allow trophy hunting. The importing governments need to stop listening to the obvious propaganda being bantered by pro-trophy hunting organisations and some academics in their countries and look below the lilies on the surface and into the swamp below.

b) WWF, which supports trophy hunting, reports massive declines among African wildlife species – but does not mention ANY contributory involvement by trophy hunters and involvement by corrupt politicians, police, rangers, customs agents.

c) Local and international scientists, NGOs need to become much more involved. Wildlife needs to become better seen as a national heritage, not a resource to be exploited by governments to suit short term corrupt ends.

3. Communities need to speak out and show better how wildlife on their lands is being exploited by foreign companies, local elites, government ministers, corrupt officials. Communities need not to be afraid to show how little benefit accrues to their average member from trophy hunting agreements signed by the elites who populate their boards aided by corrupt local politicians.

4. Reform needs to be strongly advocated, indeed pushed, by nations currently funding “development” programmes. The reason for such development programmes is to have positive input. Germany in Namibia and Tanzania, the UK in Tanzania. German taxpayers are now supporting the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism “in its efforts to improve the management of the country’s national parks. One goal is to protect and maintain the biological diversity of plants and animals; another is to promote the careful and responsible use of natural resources for the purpose of tourism, with the aim of opening up alternative income opportunities and creating new jobs”. German taxpayers should certainly have a full report on how this support is balanced against real progress.It could be said there that at the same time all wildlife has been wiped out of community conservancies as shown by the last wildlife census published by the conservancies themselves.

 Same for the UK – BUT - nature and conservation is set to receive a particularly stark government funding hit worth hundreds of millions of pounds. While the UK government has said it is committed to protecting nature and battling the climate crisis, evidence shows that cuts are already having a devastating blow on conservation programmes. The EU is making similar cuts. Not looking bright, but such cuts might cause a re-think about the effectiveness of where funds spent in the past has not benefited the eradication of destructive trophy hunting, nor exposure of those who can clearly be shown to be corrupt. Please read the original report here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/uk-aid-cuts-animals-wildlife-nature-b2799500.html

5) Foreign aid, should become either a carrot or a stick, should benefit wildlife conservation, local communities, should fund better investigative efforts to determine the reasons why the destructive practice of trophy hunting is still allowed to continue. Foreign aid should become more hard hitting and much more effective.

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