Demise of National Parks and Protected Areas in the 1980s
The rapid expansion of PAs in the 1950s and 1960s was followed by a period of economic downturn in the 1970s and 1980s. Burnett and Conover (1989: 253) discuss the enormous economic burden that the rapid expansion of national parks presented to African governments and failing national economies. The economies of sub-Saharan African countries slid into a major crisis that was conditioned by external factors (e.g. decrease of prices for mineral ores and some key cash crops) as well as internal factors (e.g. civil war and enduring insurgencies, corruption) (for a detailed summary of these different negative trends see Mendes and Bertella 2019). Structural adjustment programmes implemented under the pressure of the World Bank, in addition to major violent conflicts, led to the demise of many PAs.
Particularly in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s poaching was rampant across the continent. This was connected to a spike in world ivory prices: while prices per kilo had been between 7 and 25 US$ during the 1960s, in 1975 the world ivory price peaked, reaching more than 100 US$, and then in the 1980s remained at around 74 US$ (Martin and Martin 1992; taken from Demeke 1997: 23). There are numerous reports that describe the demise of African wildlife during these decades. In some instances, elephant populations that had increased over the two previous decades declined once again (e.g. in Tsavo NP). Especially, protected areas in tropical Africa’s highly biodiverse humid forests were under intense threat in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, 10,000 ha were excised from the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda to make way for large-scale pyrethrum farms in 1968. Only a short while later another 4000 ha were excised to allow pastoral use. The Tai National Park of Ivory Coast had lost 25 per cent of its high forest in peripheral areas only nine years after its inauguration in 1972 (Pullan 1988: 177–8). Across Africa wildlife numbers dwindled. The number of elephants shrank by about 53 per cent from about 1.35 million animals to a mere 693,000 animals between 1979 and 1989 (Demeke 1997: 20; based on Douglas-Hamilton 1980). Demeke (1997: 17) estimates that Ethiopia lost more than 70 per cent of its elephant population and Kenya lost more than half of its 120,000 elephants between 1970 and 1977. Other large game like rhino, buffalo or giraffe showed the same trends. Likewise, Reardon (1986) in his book ‘The Besieged Desert’ describes the collapse of north-western Namibia’s rhino and elephant populations and the projection that soon all wildlife would be eradicated if appropriate measures were not taken and (Bollig 2020) shows that wildlife was close to complete annihilation in Namibia’s northwest due to poaching by government officials and local pastoralists in the 1980s.
These processes led to an outcry among conservationists worldwide. Apocalyptic visions concerning Africa’s protected areas abounded in the 1970s and 80s. Just as Bernhard Grzimek had warned global audiences in the late 1950s of the impending collapse of Africa’s wildlife populations, now intense and highly emotional reports on Africa’s ‘besieged’ wildlife dominated. However, conservation was no longer a regionally limited concern to protect ecosystems and species but was increasingly understood as a global concern of far-reaching magnitude.