THE LATEST INSTALLMENT IN THE LONG, colorful history of counterproductive do-goodism is the quixotic campaign by the Humane Society of the United States to stamp out the sport hunting of elephants in Zimbabwe. This misguided effort -- though spurned by a string of environmental champions (including the National Wildlife Federation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the African Wildlife Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Conservation Union, and even Malthusian Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich) -- has lately found a new fig leaf: fiscal conservatism.
"Innocent elephants slaughtered for fun -- & YOU'RE PAYING FOR IT!" screamed one headline about the Humane Society's campaign. "It's cruelty beyond belief . . . PAID FOR BY YOU!" read a caption. To be sure, the publication thus exercised was the National Enquirer (on December 10, 1996), but its story quoted no less a worthy than the freshman senator from Colorado, Republican Wayne Allard, abristle with moral and fiscal indignation. The hunting of Zimbabwean elephants, Allard said, is "an atrocity. . . . It's callous and brutal. . . . Please join me in the fight by filling out the coupon below. . . . Demand that Congress put an end to the taxpayer- subsidized slaughter of elephants."
And how, you may ask, does the American taxpayer get into the act? It's quite a stretch -- but not beyond the ingenuity of politicians and animal- rights fundraisers eager to make use of an emotionally appealing cause. The United States is assisting community development in Zimbabwe, but it is not subsidizing the slaughter of elephants.
The story really begins back in colonial days, when European governments robbed Africans of their wildlife, which then became "the king's game." Today, most of the 35 African nations harboring elephants retain something resembling the colonial wildlife laws.
Typified by bans on commercial exploitation and hunting, these have proved a mammoth failure as conservation measures. Since Kenya banned hunting in 1976, for example, about half of its animals have disappeared, and its elephant population has plummeted, from over 100,000 to 26,000. Governments thus have been forced to explore other policies.
This is what Zimbabwe -- then still Rhodesia -- did in 1975, when the faltering white government gave landowners proprietorship of the wildlife on their land and the right to profit from it. Since then, the amount of land managed for wildlife has nearly doubled, from 12 percent to over 22 percent of the country's area. Because landowners can make money from wildlife, they are protecting more habitat, and animal populations grow. Zimbabwe's elephant population has increased by 50 percent, to over 65,000. Today, it is growing by more than 1,000 animals a year and in some regions exceeds the land's carrying capacity.
A further development came in 1989, when a program known as CAMPFIRE was launched in an effort to alleviate rural poverty in Zimbabwe. Under this Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources, to which the United States is contributing $ 28 million over 10 years, control over natural resources was devolved to the local level. Also, the same rights over wildlife that private landowners had enjoyed since 1975 were extended to blacks farming communal lands. Like white proprietors before them, farmers in the CAMPFIRE communities soon found that there was money to be made by catering to tourists' taste for hunting.
Today, licensed safari operators, or "outfitters," compete for hunting rights. Communities with elephants on their land decide whether to sell their rights and negotiate a price for the "quota" of animals the government has determined may be hunted. The winning outfitter pays the price, then sells hunts to tourists (most of them American). The current market price for an elephant "trophy hunt" is around $ 10,000 -- up significantly from $ 500, the price the government set in 1975.
In the early years of the CAMPFIRE program, very little of the take found its way into rural people's pockets. Mid-level bureaucrats siphoned off what they could in lieu of taxes, angering grass-roots participants. But today, almost three-quarters of the money is distributed to farmers, the rightful owners of the game. CAMPFIRE communities make 90 percent of their income from trophy hunting, and more than half of that comes from elephants. Thus, the devolution of legal rights to wildlife has empowered peasants, both politically and economically.
It has also strengthened incentives for conservation. Elephants and their habitat have been transformed from economic liabilities into community assets. As a result, fewer elephants are being killed: Before CAMPFIRE, about 300 elephants were killed every year in communal areas of Zimbabwe, most of them after they had raided crops. Since the CAMPFIRE program began, the toll has declined to 130 a year, some 30 killed for crop raiding and another 100 shot by hunters. The world's official arbiter of elephant population viability, an expert panel of the United Nations-sponsored Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, confirmed in February 1997 that Zimbabwe's elephant population is "large, increasing, and viable, and no serious risks have been identified."
Here then is what has the Humane Society up in arms: not a catastrophe for wildlife, but a chance to rally potential contributors who frown on hunting. As for U.S. taxpayers, the reality is that elephants and hunters are subsidizing community development, and U.S. taxpayers are simply taking up the slack.
The Congressional Black Caucus has come to CAMPFIRE's defense, as the House and Senate prepare to mark up their respective appropriations bills. The Agency for International Development's $ 6.4 billion budget request is on the table, and the CAMPFRE subsidy is at risk.
Reasonable people can disagree, of course, about whether U.S. taxpayers should be assisting CAMPFIRE or even providing aid to developing nations at all. It is a serious question, of keen concern in Africa, home to 29 of the world's 36 poorest countries. But the debate over aid should be honest and informed, not a shrill and irrelevant showdown over a nonexistent massacre of "innocent elephants."
Ike C. Sugg is fellow in wildlife and land-use policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.