The rhino horn trade and radical inequality as environmental conflict

ABSTRACT

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the most acute global conservation challenges. This paper examines what is driving young men to enter the rhino horn trade while advancing theory on environmental conflict. We show how the illicit rhino horn economy is a telling instance of environmental conflict—largely between ground-level hunters and increasingly militarized state conservation forces—that emerges from a context of radical inequality. We examine how practices ranging from labor migration and sidelining rural development to biodiversity conservation itself have profoundly transformed the Mozambican-South African borderlands from which many hunters originate, in turn generating poverty, exclusion, and vulnerability across the region. Juxtaposed against the wealth afforded by rhino hunting, this changing agrarian political economy has created an enabling environment for the rhino horn economy to take off. Illicit hunting, in other words, has become an attractive albeit risky livelihood alternative. We close by examining two questions that broaden our understanding of both environmental conflict and IWT: under what conditions might poverty lead to environmental harm and to what extent should such conflict be read as resistance that can bring about more just ends.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental conflict
• illegal wildlife trade (IWT)/rhino poaching
• inequality/poverty
• agrarian change
• green militarization
• political ecology

Acknowledgements

We thank the many people we interviewed for this paper on often difficult and at times uncomfortable topics. We also thank Tania Muhave, Ilidio Mondlane, and Kim Tran for research assistance along with Rebecca Witter, Emile Smidt, Rosaleen Duffy, participants at the 2017 BIOSEC workshop on Conservation in Conflict and Militarised Areas at the University of Sheffield, and the Boise State University Critical Studies Research Community for insightful feedback during various phases of the paper’s development. We additionally thank several anonymous reviewers and the Journal of Peasant Studies editorial team for their incisive feedback. Without the generosity and insight shared across these groups, this paper would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Illegal’ and ‘illicit’ are often used interchangeably but have nuanced differences. ‘Illegal’ refers to an act forbidden by law while ‘illicit’ accounts for varying social and cultural perceptions that might see some illegal behavior as socially acceptable, thus underscoring ‘the difficulty of attributing universally accepted meaning to crimes’ (Abraham and van Schendel 2005, 19). We use the term ‘illicit’ hunting to acknowledge the different values and perceptions concerning rhino hunting that is forbidden by law.

2 While it is difficult to tie any single climatic event to climate change, the average temperature has increased and precipitation decreased in Mozambique since the 1960s. These changes correspond with persistent drought periods in the country’s southern region (World Bank 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 435-2014-1916). Additional support was provided by the Swedish Research Council Formas (grant number 2014-13251-28691-24) and the European Research Council (grant number 694995), which funded additional research of Nícia Givá and Francis Massé.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Lunstrum

Elizabeth (Libby) Lunstrum, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Environmental Studies and Global Studies at Boise State University, USA. A geographer and political ecologist, her research interests include green militarization, the illicit wildlife trade, environmental displacement, and efforts to make conservation practice more inclusive of local and Indigenous communities. She has been conducting research in the Mozambican-South African borderlands since 2003.

Nícia Givá

Nícia Givá, Ph.D., is an agronomist and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Agronomy and Forest Engineering, Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique. Her areas of research include community-based participatory development projects, farming systems and technology adoption, gender equity and empowerment, and the governance of protected areas including the conservation-rural livelihood nexus. She is currently working on the development of a systemic action research approach to support rural livelihoods within the context of conservation.

Francis Massé

Francis Massé, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. His research draws on political ecology and political geography to understand the illegal wildlife trade, conservation law enforcement, and how these are reshaping conservation and broader human-environment relations.

Filipe Mate

Filipe Mate, B.A. is an Assistant Lecturer and Assistant Researcher at Eduardo Mondlane University. He is currently pursuing his studies in Risk at Durham University, UK. A geographer with expertise in the study of gender, since 2012 he has been working in the Massingir Region of Mozambique with communities relocated from the Limpopo National Park.

Paulo Lopes Jose

Paulo José, Ph.D., is a Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM). He is also a collaborator in UEM’s Master’s Program in Rural Sociology and Development Management. His research interests include the social history of forced displacement including displacement from the Limpopo National Park, the social impacts of large dams, and the social impacts of hunting policies and practices in colonial and post-colonial Mozambique.