the place where cacti come to die

Update on what I'm working on; problems of livelihoods. Not very well-structured.

Since my last post on “what I do, what I don't do” (emphasis on the don't), my job has become slightly more defined. At least, what I perceive as my job has become more defined, growing from blurred silhouette into practical reality – what the rest of the office thinks, I'm not sure. Certainly my program supervisor, N, doesn't seem to realize I'm now under the auspices of his department – he takes off without warning, to undetermined locations, without word of when he'll be back. But such minor pitfalls aside, I'm becoming more and more involved in the plans for the Huiku Trust, the community-based-organization which manages the GH1 wildlife management area.

Let me unpack that for you. The government of Botswana designates wildlife management areas which have certain restrictions in terms of development, and are public land still belonging to the government. Sometimes these areas remain under the management of the wildlife department, but sometimes they lease the areas, with certain requirements, to other groups. The GH1 wildlife management area is currently leased to the Huiku Community Trust, which is a great thing for the community: they are in charge of a huge area of land; it cannot be taken over by ranchers, and they can use it for their own benefit. Komku helped establish the Huiku Trust for community members in Qabo and Grootlaagte, and hired some consultants in Maun to assist in drawing up the management plan. The plan was submitted to the government to convince them that Huiku should be granted the lease. I haven't actually seen the lease yet, but I think it basically says that Huiku has control of the land so long as they stick to their original management plan, and they can make sub-leases as long as the sub-letters follow the same guidelines.

The original management plan was great – it was built around the establishment of a game reserve, which would be properly fenced and maintained to encourage a healthy, high-density game population. Attached to the game reserve would be a cultural village, camp site and lodge, and some craft activities. The whole complex would be cleverly marketed and the tourists would flock to it like eager little lambs. There were some other, smaller enterprises in the management plan, but they were either attached to the game reserve directly, or dependent on income that would ideally be coming into the communities from the tourists. (If nobody has any income, then the proposed small shops will have no customers... the initial influx of capital has to come from somewhere, after all. At the moment people live on government food rations, and most spare money goes – sadly – to alcohol consumption.)

Unfortunately, a game reserve requires a large amount of starting capital. The first step is to fence it, and that fencing costs a lot of money. For the GH1 game reserve we're talking about basic game fencing – cattle fencing is low, about 120cm, because cattle don't do a whole lot of fence-leaping. Basic game fencing is tall enough to contain the more agile antelope, maybe 2m. Serious game fencing is electrified to keep in things like hippos, rhinos, elephants – animals that can take down a basic game fence without breaking a sweat. I recently heard a story about a newly-introduced hippo on a local game reserve that decided to check out his new territory, and casually strolled right through four fences before his owner caught up with him. He was resting in a mud puddle in D'Kar. His owner had to chase the hippo back along the road, all the way back to his property. Apparently the hippo never tried to get loose again – he just wanted to know what was out there, so he went walking, but quickly realized that it was the Kalahari and not the Okavango. Aside from his artifically maintained pond on his game reserve, there was no desirable hippo territory - just desert. So he went back, and has since been quite content to stay home.

Back to the point, fencing is expensive. Drilling boreholes and equipping them with pipes and pumps is expensive. The whole venture is expensive, and money is not something that Huiku nor Komku have a lot of. For that and other reasons (time, expertise, etc.), the game reserve idea has been shelved under “too ambitious.” Unfortunately, it left a gaping vacuum in its place, which nothing has since filled.

At this point, I step in, my “Princeton in Africa” cape flying in the scorching Kalahari wind, and declare, “BUT WAIT! FEAR NOT, INNOCENT CITIZENS! I SHALL SAVE YOU ALL! THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ENDOWMENT IS HERE TO DELIVER YOU FROM HARDSHIP!”

Just kidding. (But don't we all wish? Especially that bit about the endowment?)

More realistically, at this point I step in, cobble together some meetings with a variety of people in the area, exchange emails with a collection of people around the world (several of whom I've never met), play diplomat between all of these parties (always a bad idea, trying to be diplomatic – somehow I never learn), and attempt to divine a hopeful path for the Huiku Trust.

It is slow and frustrating, and I don't really know what I'm doing, but it's work that I'm very interested in. I have experience in ecology and conservation, of course, but the primary concern is the people, and helping them make a (sustainable) living off of this land. Livelihoods and income generation in this area are a constant conundrum for me. When you have an indigenous people who have recently emerged from a pure hunter-gatherer lifestyle, are struggling to live on government handouts in ill-equipped little settlements (they live on the “Remote Area Development Program,” which is a nice euphemism for “stuck in the middle of nowhere with no jobs, no electricity, no transport, no phone line or cell phone reception, and no reliable social services because nobody wants to stay and work in your 'remote area developments.'”), and have recently been granted a huge amount of land to manage, several things come to mind. The first is, “live off the land!”

Problems with this: hunting is prohibited. There is still some poaching, of course, but you can get chucked in jail for it, and there isn't enough game to sustain the 1000-odd people living in the two GH1 communities, anyhow. Gathering is possible, but again, not enough plants for everyone, and gathering was previously accompanied by a nomadic lifestyle in small groups that could move easily from place to place to seek new vegetable resources. No longer possible.

Farming seems like a great idea, a gentle transition from hunting/gathering to the “modern world,” but permit me to remind you that this is the Kalahari. The clinics try to have small vegetable gardens to encourage healthy eating among their patients, but even a small garden requires a dedicated water source, a lot of fertilizer (sand = not so arable), and shade netting to start the seeds. Young plants are fried to death by the Kalahari sun, no matter how much you water them. Larger-scale agriculture would be expensive and extremely difficult, and people simply don't have much interest in doing it. This isn't land meant for agriculture of any kind – even crops of cactus need to be watered when it gets too dry. That's right, too dry for cactus. An interesting project involving prickly pear cacti and cochineal insects* failed because the cactus crops kept failing. Part of that was neglect on the part of their caretakers, but still, it's pretty damn hard to kill a cactus.

Tourism is seen as a great possibility, and a drive down the Trans-Kalahari highway will tell you as much – there are a dozen hopeful little signs advertising camp sites, safaris, and cultural villages. Doubtless, many of them are supported by outside funding. Doubtful, whether many of them can make it. Western Botswana and the deep Kalahari are simply not a tourist hot-spot. The Okavango Delta is hugely popular and with good reason – it's a beautiful and unique wetland teeming with wildlife. The Kahalari, as you may have gathered from the rest of this post, is dry. There isn't a lot of water, vegetation, or game. It is beautiful – stark, ascetic, elegant, with the most dramatic and incredible skies you can imagine, whether it's day or night. But it is dry, and flat, and relatively empty. There's a small element of cultural tourism, and some people are interested enough in Bushman culture to come just for that – but most of the tourists coming through this region have pre-booked, either through Okavango package deals, or as people coming on private hunting safaris. There aren't a lot of people just wandering through, ready to try out the little camp site they see advertised on the side of the highway.

This makes me nervous. Yes, eco-tourism is a great idea. It's good for the environment, it lets the Bushmen share their culture with the world, etc., etc. But is it possible for it to succeed? Even with the best management, with a very generous donor who will pay for the start-up expenses – even with those things, which we don't yet have – are there enough people coming through to make it a viable income source for two entire villages? Because that's the goal, or should be. Sustainable livelihoods for all of those people. Is it possible? It will be difficult, and it definitely requires a different approach to marketing – the current management plan and ideas being tossed around are basically variants on the 'sign on the highway' strategy. But everything I've seen here points to the fact that the only way to generate enough business in this region is to book them yourself, bring in new customers that would not be coming into the region already. In a place like the Okavango, you can just start something up – there are thousands of people that want to come to the delta already. Here, you have to convince people that they want to come, and then provide your services.

More thoughts on this later. I find myself desperately wishing I'd taken a course in microeconomics while I was at school. Bother.

Also - not sure if I said this already, but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING: “Africa, a biography of the continent,” by John Reader. It's literally a biography of the continent from it's earliest geologic beginnings, to the present day. I've never been so interested in a history book in my life.

* Cochineals are a little insect that feed on prickly pear cacti – to repel predators, they produce carminic acid, from which the carmine dye is produced. Some enterprising person at Komku decided that it would be a good project for the communities, and it hung on for 5 or 6 years before – apparently – the cactus crop failed and the project went under. This story makes me fear for the future of the hoodia project – there's a huge ready-made market (hoodia is an appetite supressant – google it and you'll find a million pages about it, hurrah for the American obsession with weight loss!) but will the hoodia crops FAIL?! Hopefully not. The prickly pear is a South American cactus, whereas hoodia is native to the Kalahari, so it should be a bit hardier. I never thought the day would come when I was debating with myself whether a cactus was sufficiently hardy enough. Good grief.