"Greetings to all dignitaries….
Hello, for those of you who I’ve not said hello, my name is Dr. Al Maki and I am Chairman of the SCIF Conservation Committee. This year I completed my 25th African hunting safari and I’ve had the pleasure of hunting in each of the countries represented in this room today. Our Committee has spent over $XX million dollars in the last XX years on sustainable use conservation programs worldwide and we are pleased to cooperatively support this important annual Forum. I am honored to be with you once again this week for the fifteenth meeting of the African Wildlife Consultative Forum.
We gather this year in Tanzania, a country blessed with abundant natural resources and a rich history of hunting. We meet at the epicenter, both time and place, of modern wildlife conservation, and Tanzania, with Africa’s largest lion population, East Africa’s largest elephant population, and vast swaths wilderness, is at the front of today’s evolving conservation movements.
As a nation, Tanzania is deeply committed to wildlife conservation. Over 37% of Tanzania’s land base is covered by national parks, protected areas, game reserves, and community conservancies, one of the highest percentages in all of Africa and the world. The government and people of Tanzania have established 16 National Parks with over 67,000 sq km dedicated to photographic tourism. While tourists in mini buses go to Ngorogoro Crater and Serengeti, no one visits the other 95% of Sub-Saharan Africa. Much of this area either has too few game animals or is too arid to be of interest to photo tourists. For these areas the government has determined that the best form of land use is sport hunting. Now, in Tanzania approximately 50 hunting outfitters lease about 140 hunting concessions while conducting sustainable use hunting, anti-poaching efforts and providing jobs and economic benefits to local communities.
Wildlife populations are thriving as a result of the success of those programs and the economic engine of that conservation success has been hunting.
The same is true for the other sub-Saharan countries present here today - significantly more land is protected via sustainable use than conventional parks and protected areas. Time and again the wildlife management departments of your countries have proven that sustainable use hunting provides economic value to wildlife and promotes the sensible use of wildlife for the two main goals of conservation of wildlife and habitat and the betterment of local communities.
Some of you may be familiar with the comprehensive economic survey recently conducted by Southwick and Assoc. and funded by SCIF. In surveying eight of the sub Saharan countries that serve as active safari destinations, they found that the annual economic impact of hunting related tourism contributes $426M annually and supports over 53,000 jobs. Also over 1.4 M square km of land is conserved for hunting which is more than all formally protected areas on the entire continent.
Hunting gives wildlife a positive value and changes attitudes of local communities, providing incentives against poaching and mitigating human-wildlife conflict. Without the economic value provided by hunting, wildlife will disappear. Quite simply, where hunting happens, conservation happens.
Today sustainable use hunting is under attack like never before. Fueled by the killing of a single lion, the anti-hunting movement has been energized and we see well meaning but poorly informed activists pushing for legislation banning hunting, the import and export of hunting trophies and even the transport of hunting artifacts. This week we will feature science-based research directed at better management techniques for the iconic African lion and other large carnivores. The battle we face is one of telling the world these stories and the science behind them. We must show the world that policies that restrict hunting or make it difficult or impossible for hunters to import their trophies are actually anti-conservation. Not only are they anti-conservation, but these policies are also anti-people. Our challenge is to show the world that a science-based management approach is pro-hunting, pro-conservation and pro-people at the same time.
I wish you the best in your discussions here this week and trust that together we as the hunting community and you as the representatives of your wildlife and local communities can come together to support sustainable use hunting across Africa."