A study by two Swedish researchers has found that hunting tourism in Namibia benefits rural households and urban wage earners more than the owners of private game farms and that every extra Namibian dollar a visiting hunter spends translates into one extra Namibian dollar in national income. They also found that a hunter’s spending raised overall national income by an amount equal to two to three years’ income for an average Namibian.
In their study, published in the latest SA Journal of Wildlife Research, Emma Samualsson and Jesper Stage of Umea University’s Department of Economics, compared the benefits of hunting on communal land conservancies and on private ranches. They concluded that while both types of hunting have sizeable economic impacts, an average conservancy hunter has a larger overall impact on the country’s economy than an average hunter on private land.
This, they explain, is largely because the poor people benefiting from the income from hunts in communal areas are more likely to spend the extra money, generating additional multiplier effects for the people and firms that supply the extra goods and services used by the tourists. In addition, hunting in communal conservancies and concession areas sometimes includes high-value animals that are not available on ranches. – Roelof Bezuidenhout
