Food security reduces poaching
Gorillas are one of many creatures threatened by poaching for bushmeat. Steve Osofsky said, "Poaching really is quite common in many parts of rural Africa. It's called 'poaching for the pot.' People are just trying to feed their families. These are not bad people. These are just people who are trying to survive."
We can help African wildlife by helping people. It turns out that when people have enough to eat, they’re less likely to kill wildlife.
We spoke with Steve Osofsky, Senior Policy Advisor for Wildlife Health at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Osofsky worked for several years as a wildlife veterinarian in Southern Africa – an area challenged by exponential growth in human population.
... and increased contact with wildlife. For example, as the health of a farmer’s livestock falls, wild animals are often poached just to put food on the table.Osofsky told us an effective way that wildlife can be protected is through improving what’s called food security – the access that people have to adequate and nutritious food.
Steve Osofsky: By using often relatively inexpensive animal health tools — cheap vaccinations, improved parasite control, things like that – people’s food security can be dramatically enhanced, and they are less interested in poaching, and wildlife numbers go up. What makes this even more exciting is that when wildlife numbers start to rebound, all of a sudden there are new economic opportunities that present themselves.
For instance, Osofsky said that communities in places like Zambia have come together to open their own bush camps. They’ll benefit from tourism revenues because wildlife populations are rebounding now that poaching has decreased.
Thanks to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Read Earth & Sky’s interview with Steve Osofsky.
Our thanks to:
Steve Osofsky
Senior Policy Advisor for Wildlife Health
Wildlife Conservation Society
Has anyone researched the amount of poaching organised by ‘people above the law’ in comparison to poaching for food?
UN Secretary-General Mr. Kofi Annan has reported regularly since 1997 in his Annual World Food Day Message that humankind can feed itself with what food is available. More food production is not what is needed; however, food redistribution is long overdue. Why not more fairly and equitably distribute the abundant harvests people derive from the blessed Earth we inhabit and, by so doing, end human obesity and starvation, obliterate extreme poverty, and assure food security for the human family worldwide? The determinable positive effects of such change would be found ubiquitously in the form of improvements in human and environmental health.
poaching ... im sick of it…now as a result of these stupid people and their guns…my favorite animal the siberian tiger is now endagered
I’m not sure it’s true anymore that there’s truly enough food being grown to go around in the world … to feed everyone. Does anyone have any information on that?
It’s one of the subjects Earth & Sky wants to explore in 2007.
Dear Deborah, Chad and G. McIntyre,
Let’s get the scientific data! I do not know what data Kofi Annan uses; but I can add, from the emerging data I am examining, there is plenty of food to feed the global human population now. (It may not be that way eternally; but, for the moment, world food harvests could be sufficient. We have a FOOD REDISTRIBUTION PROBLEM that most politicians and virtually all masters of the universe do not want to have examined. At least in 2006, there are unexamined data that indicate there may not be a FOOD PRODUCTION PROBLEM in the world today.
What is most exasperating is that it takes the current impetus of Earth & Sky to even formulate this vital question and ask for these data? As starting points, the data bases of the FAO and the World Bank could be useful.
Where are the NGOs? Where are the International Crisis Group, Union of Concerned Scientists, UN Distant Early Warning Assessment Group, World Wildlife Fund, World Resources Institute and Conservation International? There are likely 100 other NGOs with the capability of gathering these data. Where are the responsible instrumentalities of nation-states such as the Population Committee of NAS in the USA? Where are professional societies like the International Society for Conservation Biology? Where is everybody?
Dear Stephenearlsalmony,
Where are they?..probably in meetings discussing and planning more meetings. This may seem a strange remark, but sadly it may well be quite true. I believe that directly or indirectly World Food did a tremendous amount of harm when they decided to give unnecessary food to people whom they thought were starving…when there was plenty of food in the country that could have been shared if the governments in those countries would have been interested in solving the problem.
Dear G. McIntyre,
Your comments are most appreciated, in part, because they point to something truly problematic regarding the human predicament before us. Of course, you are correct. It is precisely the provision of food (from an ever increasing world food supply) that could be giving rise to skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers. If that is so, how can anyone, starting with me, recommend that we now should do MORE of the very thing that is producing THE OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM. It appear that such isolated action would serve to do little else but precipitate even more of a population explosion than we have occurring on the surface of Earth now. If such action was insulated from education, then humanity would likely speed down the present “primrose path” it is taking toward catastrophe at a noticeably faster rate than what is happening in 2006.
It appears to me that if we feed the poor and starving, and not also provide them with education about the human predicament our species could soon face, then we do not provide a worthwhile service to humanity. On the other hand, if we educate as well as feed people, and explain that each and every person in the human community can do good things by regulating certain currently unbridled economic expansion, per-human consumption and reproduction activities in an effort to save the world as we know it, then I have unbounded hope and complete faith in a good enough future for our children and coming generations.
The potential global challenges before humanity do appear formidable; but we can take the measure of whatever problems are presented to us and find solutions consonant with humane values.