Wildlife is essential

Wildlife holds significant benefits for Namibia such as creating employment, supporting livelihoods and producing venison, which can potentially be a future export product.
This was the view of the minister of environment and tourism, Pohamba Shifeta, when he opened the ninth International Wildlife Ranching Symposium in Windhoek. This is the first year Namibia is hosting the symposium.
The conference, with the theme ‘Wildlife – the key to prosperity for rural communities’, holds enormous possibilities for Namibian game farmers, bringing them into an international network of game ranchers.
Shifeta said wildlife production, if done correctly, has a direct, positive effect on conservation although he expressed concern that the production of high-value species seems to have resulted in increasing intolerance towards predators and increased fencing.
He said the ministry would monitor this situation to ensure through regulation that wildlife production maintains a positive role in biodiversity conservation.
According to Shifeta, Namibia is one of the few countries in Africa allowing private ownership of certain species of wildlife.
“This creates an opportunity for commercial wildlife production for tourism, hunting and venison production.”
According to him Kenya banned private ownership in 1977, which resulted in a 70% drop in game numbers.
The minister further stressed that wildlife plays an important role on freehold farmland, adding that it is estimated that the game population on commercial farms exceeds wildlife numbers in protected areas.
“We have realised that wildlife, through their adaptation to harsh environmental conditions, bring greater resilience to farming operations, as again experienced in the current drought.”
Shifeta also said that hunting is of cardinal importance to Namibia and an important source of income on farmland and elsewhere.
He said taking into account that only a small percentage of Namibia’s land is arable with low rainfall, it has become inevitable to explore other means of farming.
He added that conservation hunting can be combined with other traditional farming operations and more than 1 000 farms provide this activity.
“We are fortunate to have ample space and our farms are typically large, on average over 5 000 hectares.”
According to him Namibia still has important communal populations of wildlife on farmland, such as kudu, oryx, mountain zebra, warthog and hartebeest.
Together with these there are also large populations of leopard, cheetah and increasingly also spotted hyaena on commercial farmland.
Shifeta said although there are conflicts, it is important to incorporate the needs of these predators in the ecosystem.
Many other species have been reintroduced on farmland, including giraffe, impala, roan and sable antelope, and these populations contribute to the overall health of the national biodiversity, the minister said.
“There is an interesting duality in Namibia. There is interest among some wildlife producers to intensify game farming, and large areas have been game-fenced, but on the other hand, we wish to create incentives for neighbouring farms to be managed together to create greater connectivity, provide corridors for wildlife movements in the face of climate change and to create buffer areas around our parks. These competing interests need to be managed for the greater good of conservation.”