The Saudi government should be commended for having undertaken the protection, reintroduction, and ultimate recovery of the Arabian oryx in its deserts.
As with most species in the Middle East, Asia, and the entire continent of Africa, the Arabian oryx has suffered from illegal hunting and a fundamental lack of enforceable legal protections for far too long.
While the situation in Saudi Arabia is quite different from that in Africa or Asia, many Gulf Cooperation Council countries could learn a great deal from how other nations manage their wildlife. In Africa, for example, the issue seems to be one of funding. It is a logistically difficult and expensive process to insulate hundreds of thousands of hectares from poachers seeking ivory in a place like Zimbabwe’s Dande Safari Area or even South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
Similarly, poaching is the greatest threat to rhinoceros in all of Asia as well as Africa. This is easy to imagine given the economic incentives at work and the costs associated with insulating various species from exploitation.
For example, an aging and rather unattractive leopard skin will certainly sell in a Cairo bazaar for more than $1,000. Illegal ivory sells for $1,000 per kg and rhinoceros horn in various forms is routinely sold for an incredible $80 per gram — 30 percent more than the current price of gold. Again, in many places, the barrier to protect these species is financial and the persistent impact of illegal hunting is due to the expense of hiring game wardens to cover so much area. A government must provide vehicles, petrol, support personnel, light aircraft to aid in patrols, and food for workers, who often move on foot to provide 24-hour security. Even weaponry should be provided given that a black-market ivory merchant will surely take issue with the presence of law enforcement.
Although the specific Saudi and general GCC cases are not characterized by insufficient funding, it is nonetheless possible to learn a great deal from these sub-Saharan African and Asian examples.
In India, for example, the government has embraced the general prohibition of hunting since 1972. While the country has, as a consequence, enjoyed success as rhinoceros, tiger, and leopard populations have slowly risen, this has been accomplished at great expense and with significant logistical difficulty. Conversely, many African countries (Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia being just three examples) have embraced a rather sophisticated process of conservation via consumptive use.
Hunting is legal in these three African nations, among others, and the results have been impressive. Revenue is generated via the sustainable hunting of rhinoceros, elephants, leopards, and lions (among other species) to enrich the government-run conservation sectors as well as private interests holding either leases for hunting areas or possessing private land along with the game residing upon it. The result has led to Zimbabwe and South Africa seeing the populations of some of these species rise to levels in excess of habitat-carrying capacity. For example, elephant populations in Zimbabwe have risen from less than 30,000 50 years ago to over 100,000 today — over double the country’s theoretical carrying capacity for the species and representing one-fourth of the entire continent’s population.
This is not terribly surprising when hunters often pay over $50,000 to hunt an elephant, with that money going toward government licensing fees, locally sourced employees, and leaseholders. People, it turns out, have a strong incentive to protect their livelihoods, and this often prompts outfitters to form their own private anti-poaching units as has been done by Charlton McCallum Safaris in the Dande area of Zimbabwe. Even absent this explicit action, all resident species (even those that are less iconic) seem to benefit from the inflow of funds with hunters, guides, employees, and clients becoming de facto game wardens in their collective quest for a trophy.
Even though Saudi Arabia, quite admirably, has the funds and the will to successfully protect habitat and oryx populations, one might ask why any nation would not convert a cash expense into an ongoing and successful commercial enterprise.
What’s more, such an enterprise (in addition to generating jobs, private sector profit, and government revenue) might also provide a diversified long-term revenue stream for Saudi Arabia as well other GCC countries employing such a strategy. These are all nations not historically associated with eco-tourism, but this need not be the case in the future. There are certainly people who would travel from Europe or the US to Saudi Arabia to pay for the privilege of hunting Arabian oryx, Arabian tahr, striped hyena, goitered gazelle, mountain gazelle, sandgrouse, and even houbara and/or MacQueen’s bustard.
Ironically, the above policy recommendation will be most loudly contested when applied to the most endangered of these species. Basic economic theory suggests, however, that it is these animals most in need of the generated revenue to protect them. Failure to embrace the economics of consumptive use might just result in protecting some of these animals directly into extinction and will certainly result in unnecessary expenses being incurred to achieve inferior ecological results.
• John W. Salevurakis is an associate professor of economics at the American University in Cairo and an author.
