Should We Save Gorillas or People

The United Nations have declared 2009 the Year of the Gorilla – and there is a call for actions from everyone to participate in global efforts to save gorillas.

Some journalists are questioning the morality of saving gorillas while people continue to suffer in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. When in Rwanda I attended the Kwita Izina Gorilla Naming ceremony – a national event, after which I met a famous doctor who is rebuilding the medical infrastructure of the country. He had been invited to Rwandas exclusive tourism lodge on the edge of the Volcano National Park, where a visitor pays $2,000 per night. A stones throw away he told me he had been treating a community for common diseases, malaria, typhoid, cholera. The lodge made him very angry he said, because all attention was on the gorillas, not the people who live around the park. Less than 20% of the proceeds from gorilla tourism trickle down to these communities, some of the poorest in Africa and very densely populated.

He told me about the pitiful health status of people living around the protected areas and asked me how conservationists could promote community conservation when communities were suffering so severely, not only in Rwanda but in Congo, Uganda and even Kenya. He asked me how tourism could promote the image of Masai with their two lower teeth bashed out, a romantic image, a reflection of failure to prevent tetanus or lock jaw, a deadly and painful bacterial infection that causes muscle fiberes to shorten until the jaw cannot open. Poverty he implied, must not become a tourist attraction.

Then Paul Farmer and I had a huge (friendly) argument in which he two accused me directly of having my priorities completely wrong. I accused him of failing to comprehend that human health and living standards are directly affected by the state of the environment. We didn’t see eye to eye … and I wondered who was being stubborn. The solution is not, and can never be, to simply be to get rid of parks and conservation areas for the sake of giving more people land. In such cases the problems are only delayed, and then exacerbated once the land is once again over utilized. It just does not make sense to me that we should permit people to destroy a national asset that would take decades to recover, just to feed a population for a few days or weeks.  Rwanda is hugely is a tiny country that is overpopulated – even if people are allowed into the few parks it will not allevaite the problem in any appreciable way.

But not everyone agrees. In a recent thought provoking article Alex Halperin reminds us that Rwanda is staking its economy on gorillas. To protect this national asset the authorities go to great lengths to kept the gorillas safe and healthy, mainly by restricting human contact, especially with poor villagers who are not allowed into the National Park to forage for natural resources. So, while the national economy benefits, the local population pays the cost.

In Seatlepi blog Robert McClure asks if saving gorillas in a poor country is sustainable. Read the Halperin article here and tell us what you think.