Namibia’s Wild Meat Economy
Where animals are harvested legally, wildlife populations surge. Namibia offers a striking example
Imagine a country as vast as France and Italy combined but with a population of only a quarter that of Paris. Now, imagine most of this population crammed into a narrow band in the country’s far north. Across the rest of its expansive, rural landscape, human density drops to fewer than one person per 10 square kilometres – levels comparable only to Greenland or Mongolia. It’s natural to assume an abundance of space for wildlife there – and you’d be right.
Welcome to Namibia, where the butcher’s counter in the supermarket might offer antelope, gazelle, or zebra alongside more conventional carnivorous treats. At the country’s massive farms or community-run conservancies, wildlife is just as common as livestock. Wildlife is woven into everyday life. The biltong (jerky) that hikers pack is just as likely to be made from oryx as from beef.
This reality may seem surprising, given the awful impact of European settlers on wildlife elsewhere. How has Namibia’s wildlife survived, and why is it more abundant here than elsewhere in Africa?
Wildlife as a resource: unlocking cultural and economic value for conservation
The answer lies on that butcher’s counter. For Namibians, animals are economically and culturally valuable. Wildlife generates income through safaris, hunting, and the meat trade, and this value is supported by laws which incentivise proper wildlife management. As a result, Namibia has three times more elephants today than at independence in 19901, and giraffes or zebra are a common sight on farms. The country now boasts way more wildlife outside its national parks: over 80% live on private land2.
For Namibians, animals are economically and culturally valuable… and this value is supported by laws which incentivise proper wildlife management.
Contrast this with many other parts of the world, where large animals are revered as sacred. There, the trade in wildlife products is strictly banned. The very idea of consuming impala or decorating a room with a lion hide is met with horror. The harvesting of ivory or rhino horn can lead to severe legal consequences. Wildlife has no tradeable value and even proposing that it does sparks condemnation.
Sacred reverence may feel appropriate but comes with unintended consequences. Elephants, rhinos, buffalo, lions, and hippopotamuses are dangerous animals. They kill over 6,000 people per year across Africa3. If such a death toll occurred in Europe or North America, the animals responsible would be swiftly eradicated, but these self-same Westerners expect Africans to coexist with these creatures, often at great personal risk, for the sake of conservation.
How Africans manage that relationship offers telling contrasts. In West Africa, regulated hunting is rare, but poaching is rife. In Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, and South Africa, where wildlife is legally monetised, wild megafauna is abundant. These nations have Africa’s highest populations of large, threatened species like elephants and rhinos. Wildlife here is admired and managed as a valuable resource, with laws regulating and allowing its trade. This economic approach has kept species numbers high and habitats intact (well, less degraded at least – bush encroachment and land degradation are an issue with mismanaged wildlife, just as with mismanaged livestock).
When wildlife is a neighbour, you must rub along with, it must behave. A lazy leopard that goes for calves rarely becomes an old leopard. Troublesome elephants are shot through well-regulated permit systems. And if somebody has the controversial desire for a lion hide, he can pay the permit fee, hire a registered hunting guide, and go and shoot a so-called problem animal – the kind that has grown a taste for human meat in remote rural areas.
From a conservation perspective, regulated hunting works. It’s not just elephants thriving in Namibia, but carnivores too. While no one has precise numbers, the lion population seems to be somewhere between stable and increasing, while the Cheetah Conservation Fund has documented a solid rise in cheetah numbers.
Botswana and Namibia’s success at elephant conservation presents a conundrum. Each adult animal consumes around 150 kilograms of vegetation daily, often destroying three times that much in the process. That’s a lot of plants which need a lot of land to grow, land that could be used for something else.
In beautiful places, that’s not a problem. The wildlife can be monetised through photo safaris. Tourists pay permit fees, spend on lodging and food, hire guides and drivers, and provide plenty of jobs for everything from waiters to road graders. But what about those vast Namibian landscapes where tourists don’t go, but lions, wildebeest, and elephants do?
There, people still need to make a living. The large animals that share their landscapes are not just dangerous but also compete for forage and water. Unless living with those beasts is worthwhile, they will eventually be extirpated, just as they have been across most of West Africa. Happily, Namibia, unlike West African states, allows the regulated harvesting of most wildlife for meat. That makes wildlife valuable – and thus tolerable – to their human neighbours.
But that does not apply to elephants, rhinos, or carnivores like lions. These dangerous animals need other high-value uses to justify their presence on farmland. And that’s where trophy hunting comes in. A single hunter willing to pay a permit fee of $100,000 to hunt an old elephant bull can bring in as much income as 1,000 tourists with a fraction of the environmental impact – a hunter needs neither roads nor a network of lodgings and restaurants.
Well-regulated hunting protects wildlife and maintains high biodiversity areas in other countries. For example, regulated hunting maintains high biodiversity areas outside parks in rich places like Belgium, yet it remains controversial, with airlines refusing to transport trophies and hunters facing social backlash. So, trophy hunting becomes too hard, which depresses demand and permit prices and reduces the value of that wildlife, making poaching easier and extirpation more tempting, running the risk of some species disappearing entirely.
A single hunter willing to pay a permit fee of $100,000 to hunt an old elephant bull can bring in as much income as 1,000 tourists with a fraction of the environmental impact – a hunter needs neither roads nor a network of lodgings and restaurants.
That’s why southern African governments have long argued for the comprehensive, regulated monetisation of wildlife – including through the meat trade and trophy hunting. Botswana, exasperated by a recent German refusal to countenance its decision to resume the practice, recently suggested the country import several hundred of its elephants and let them roam inside Germany (thanks to their bulk, elephants would do just fine in a much cooler climate). These diplomatic spats could be seen as amusing, as Botswana is not about to cull thousands of its roughly 300,000 elephants.
But not all animals are so lucky.
The rhino dilemma: Can legal trade save a species?
Their horns are highly coveted in East Asia. Spooked by the intense demand, conservationists try to enforce some of the most formidable protections ever devised for wildlife around them. The result has been depressingly predictable: rhino horn now fetches up to $60,000/kilogramme on the black market. Poaching has become a goldmine for ruthless crime syndicates and protecting rhinos from them becomes ever costlier, driving the remaining animals into small, fortress-like parks like Kenya’s Ol Pejeta.
With thousands of square kilometres of prime rhino habitat on its vast farms, Namibia could be a rhino success story. But few farmers bother with them: the cost of protection is just too high.
John Hume, a South African farmer who once hosted 10% of the world’s southern white rhino population until 2023, is a prime example of how counterproductive the ban on the horn trade is. John accumulated a warehouse of horns from dehorning his animals – millions of dollars worth of product he could not sell. The cost of protecting his rhinos and stockpile became prohibitive: last year, he was forced to sell his whole herd of 2,000 rhinos to a private park operator. The animals disappeared from his land and thus from that landscape, exacerbating the problem of them surviving only in parks guarded by heavily armed men.
This situation is avoidable. Rhinos could thrive if the trade in rhino horns were legalised.
Horns are made of keratin, like human fingernails, and can be harvested painlessly every 18 months. Managing that is more adventurous than dehorning cattle – Helicopters! Dart guns! Sedatives! – but does little harm to the animals (and for sensitive souls, harvesting methods tailored to reduce the animals’ stress are under continuous development).
Legalising the market would provide a financial incentive for rhino conservation, reduce poaching by driving down black market prices, and make protecting rhinos more affordable. Yet for decades, efforts to legalise the trade have stalled, keeping rhinos critically endangered.
Legalising the market would provide a financial incentive for rhino conservation, reduce poaching by driving down black market prices, and make protecting rhinos more affordable.
For over 40 years, Namibia has focused on preventing poaching rather than just catching poachers, with remarkable success. Treating wildlife as a resource has kept their numbers stable or growing.
Paradoxically, feasting one’s way through the local wildlife may be one of the best ways to ensure its long-term survival.