Published in the Weekend Financial Times, 20 July, 2024

Your Africa correspondent does a good job of telling FT readers about the work of African Parks in rescuing many wildlife reserves in Africa (The Battle to Control Africa’s Parks”).

Yes, there is a downside, and there is a counter-narrative. What gets insufficient mention is that thriving wildlife parks can bring tourists and precious foreign exchange. That is one side of the bargain. There is an economic plus to the host nation.

Tourism may provide employment opportunities, but is that sufficient to overcome the incipient colonialism and dispossession?

Gorongosa is a wildlife park in Mozambique. It was decimated in the civil war in that country. Through a chapter of accidents an American entrepreneur and philanthropist Greg Carr has managed to bring the park back to its former greatness.

But over and above that he and this team have kept the local people onside by developing employment opportunities in coffee, cashew nuts, honey and so on. These provide an alternative to poaching and turning trees into charcoal, and encircle the park. Indeed, they have attracted internal migrants to settle.

He has also brought in American universities to study the park, and to train up locals to do that work. Again new opportunities.

It would have been nice if your Africa correspondent had found similar stories beyond the arming of rangers and the “fortress”-like mode of African Parks. Indeed, Gorongosa could provide a model that African parks could well consider emulating.

Peter Davis, Auckland, New Zealand