Economics for the Wilds

Wildlife, Wildlands, Diversity and Development

Edward Barbier, Timothy Swanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032808284
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000698985
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Originally published in 1992 Economics for the Wilds argues that an economics that properly values the resources of the wilds offers the best long-term security for their future. Most of the world's wilds have, in fact, always been utilized by local societies who have managed their resources sustainably, and one important guarantee for their preservation is therefore the continued participation of those communities and an adequate reward to them for their management. The book looks at the complexity and global nature of the issues, at the application of economics to the wilds and at the policies for their conservation and sustainable management which then result. It also examines specific forms of utilization of wild species and habitats, both sustainable and unsustainable, and including community-based development, tourism, the use of rainforest products, poaching and the impact of conservation on wildlife use. The book concludes that a comprehensive utilization strategy for wild resources is needed to ensure their continued existence and the continued flow of benefits from them.

1
WILDLIFE AND WILDLANDS, DIVERSITY AND DEVELOPMENT

Timothy M. Swanson

Few would question the value of wildlife and wildlands, yet these most irreplacable of all resources are dwindling rapidly. What remains is largely in the still-developing countries, and a clear threat currently hangs over that. This apparent contradiction between values and realities raises several fundamental questions. Why has the development process been so destructive of our natural resources? Must it continue to be so in the future? Are we destined to share the world with just a few dozens of species? Or can development be compatible with the maintenance of the natural environment? These are the issues that we address first in this chapter, and then in more detail throughout this volume.

We believe diversity and development need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, to a large extent, maintaining the diversity of wild resources is one of the necessary conditions for sustainable development. As such wild resources should be treated more often as an input into the development process; they cannot be left entirely out of the equation.

However important these diverse resources are intrinsically, they are also important because we - the human species - use them. And, whether we welcome or deplore the fact, it is the latter value that will be the key to their continuing survival in the near term. As soaring human populations cause the pressures for development to build, there will be a need to stress wildlife utilization in order to preserve wildlands throughout the next century. For all those who appreciate and enjoy the wilds, this is a very important lesson to learn.

Diversity and development

At the broadest level this is a book about the conservation of biological diversity, which is one of the most fundamentally important international environmental problems facing the world community today. The conservation of biological diversity, or “biodiversity”, was one of the chief concerns of the World Conservation Strategy, developed by UNEP, IUCN and WWF in 1980, and it will be one of the topics for the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.

Biological diversity is closely related to the number of species that exist within the earth’s ecosystems - the loss of a species represents a loss of genetic diversity, and an examination of the problem of endangered species, therefore, is an important part of any attempt at understanding the reasons for diversity losses.

Biodiversity conservation is, at base, concerned with the world’s continuing losses of genetic capital, i.e. the amount and extent of genetic variety within the earth’s ecosystems. Genes determine the particular characteristics of a given organism and encode the information that determines the specific capabilities of that organism. The greater the variety of genetic material in existence, the greater the variety of organisms that exist or that will exist in the near future.

The motivation to conserve biological diversity is not an altruistic one. There are clear and positive links between biological diversity and human development. At the global level, the loss of biodiversity means the loss of options for all of us and for future generations (Reid, W. and Miller, K., 1989). These are irreversible losses. They can also be very substantial losses. The variety of microbes, plants and animals that have only recently been discovered to be of human usefulness illustrate the potential value of the undiscovered.

In addition to any yet-to-be-discovered economic values, there is also the very real dependence of our ecosystems, and hence our economies, on the diversity that exists. The crops and animals that we currently rely upon are continually under threat from outbreaks of pests and disease, and it is the diverse strains that exist in the wild that we must ultimately rely upon in these circumstances to provide more resistant strains.

Biodiversity also provides insurance against such situations. Recently introduced wild relatives of domestic wheat and barley have been estimated to provide annual disease protection worth between $50 million and $160 million for US crops alone (Briefbook: Biotechnology and Genetic Diversity, 1985). But the reliance of our livelihoods on diverse lifeforms is still much broader than these few categories indicate. Humans live within and are part of ecosystems, and we depend in every way upon the web of services that they provide. The intrinsic value of such dependence is impossible to quantify (although in many senses all value may ultimately derive from these systems); however, the risks involved in altering these systems must be recognized and the costs of such risks internalized. We will expand on this theme further in Chapter 3.

Box 1.1: Market values of recently utilized varieties

Most of the world’s biodiversity remains untapped by humans, and for this reason often remains undervalued. However, the fact that a species has no apparent value at present is no reason to suppose that it will have no value in the future; many recently utilized varieties have proved to be highly valuable.

Year of first marketing	Species	Origin	Estimated market value
1963	Rosy Periwinkle	Madagascar	$ 88m. p.a. (1985)
1976	Lycopers, chmielewskii Peru		$ 8m. p.a. (1986)
1981	Wild Hops	_	$ 15m. p.a. (1981)
1990s	Zea diploperennis (Perennial maize)	Mexico	Potentially $ billions

Sources: Wilson, E., 1986; Hoyt, 1988.

Finally, there is also the very tangible value obtained by those persons who rely upon the diverse products of our earth for their subsistence and development. Most of these people belong to groups who have traditionally used and consumed the products of natural habitats, and to them “biodiversity” represents real and concrete resources. For example, in many parts of the developing world, the majority of the daily intake of protein continues to come from wildlife (Prescott-Allan, R. and Prescott-Allan, C., 1982).

It is very clearly in the interest of global human development to attempt to conserve biodiversity for all of the various values that it represents. There has been quite a substantial literature developing recently that makes this point. (Wilson, E., 1986; McNeely, J. et al., 1990; Reed, W. and Miller, K., 1989; Office of Technology Assessment, 1988; Orians, Brown, Kunin, and Swierzbinski, 1990). Biological diversity conservation and human development are closely linked. It should be not only our appreciation and enjoyment of the world’s natural diversity that should motivate our actions in this regard; but also our “self-interest”. This is true not only at the local level of communities that are dependent largely upon the diverse products of natural habitat for subsistence purposes, but it is also true at the global level for the insurance and options that biodiversity preserves for us all.

Wildlife and wildlands

The conservation of biological diversity is closely linked to the conservation of “wildlife” and “wildlands”. This is known as in situ conservation, or the conservation of diversity “in its natural place”. There are various ex situ alternatives, seed banks, botanical and zoological gardens, etc., however these are not practical options for the conservation of more than a small fraction of threatened species. The world’s biodiversity is too great and too poorly known to be catalogued and stored in a “genetic library”. Long-term storage facilities even for that stock that has already been well-catalogued is difficult to acquire, and this represents only the tiniest fraction of all species known and unknown. Even considering the “higher” species alone, ex situ conservation is a difficult and expensive task (Wilcox, B., 1990).¹

In addition to the expense of ex situ conservation methods, the two methods have very different effects. The conservation of biodiversity implies the need to conserve not only a given stock of genetic capital but also the evolutionary process itself, i.e. the capacity for species to mix, mutate and evolve in an ongoing interactive process. Ex situ conservation maintains a one-time “snapshot” of existing diversity; it does not provide the background against which diversity thrives and develops.

For these reasons, in situ methods are generally both more effective and more cost-efficient in conserving biodiversity. Following this reasoning, many conservationists have come to equate the conservation of biological diversity with a strategy of “preservation of natural habitats”. The obvious fallacy of this equation lies in the observation that, by definition, all species contribute to biological diversity; they do not have to derive from wilderness. Even the most common breed of domestic livestock represents an individual and unique set of genes, and many of these species are the most highly valued (by markets) in existence.

However, it is equally obvious that a policy of biodiversity conservation need not be focused primarily on such species. None of the heavily utilized species, e.g. none of the 80 to 100 species listed in the Food and Agriculture Organization tables on world food production, are in any danger of immediate extinction. Therefore, despite the importance of these species it is clear that proponents of genetic conservation need not be most concerned with their preservation.

What distinguishes these from the many other species that are endangered are the incentives that exist to assure their conservation.² The genetic traits of heavily utilized species are conserved for their known economic value alone. In addition, the closest relatives of these species are also being conserved through active international programmes.³ Thus financial incentives have produced diversity conservation programmes for these heavily utilized species, and their very closest of kin. Yet, millions of other species remain threatened, on account of the absence of any similar programmes for their protection.⁴ There are, quite simply, no incentives for the protection of the vast majority of the world’s species.

An understanding of the nature of the process that has resulted in many species being “threatened”, and a few others not so, is essential to the understanding of the terms “wildlife” and “wildlands”.⁵ That is, the conservation of wildlife is not concerned simply with the preservation of that small number of species well known from visits to the zoo and media campaigns. Rather, it concerns the management of a process by which a small and select group of domesticated species are being maintained at the expense of all other species.

For thousands of years people have been splitting the products of the natural world into two groups: one, a set of closely managed “domesticated” species and another, a group of virtually unmanaged ones. This is no accident of nature; it is the work of human choice and economic forces. The group of “threatened species” are inevitably those that are often undervalued and under-utilized and almost always unmanaged.⁶ For this group, economic forces dictate that there is negligible investment in their conservation, and hence these species come under threat when humans begin to compete for their habitats. The prospect of mass extinctions is raised when human population growth threatens the habitats of large numbers of unmanaged species.⁷

Although this explains the differential characteristics shared by the group of “threatened species” and why they are in danger of extinction, it does not explain the relative sizes of the two groups. Why are so many more species currently threatened than not? What economic pressures support a relatively tiny number of maintained species, rather than a much larger number?

Economic “specialization” has contributed most to the homogeneity in species seen first throughout the developed world, and increasingly now in the developing world. The law of specialization is one of the principles of economics. In simple terms it states that uniformity can contribute significantly to productivity. This is so because repetition allows for the application of capital to the production process. As a single undifferentiated task is repeated more and more times, it becomes economically feasible to introduce more and more powerful tools to assist in the production process. Of course, this implies a clear-cut trade-off between lack of diversity and productivity in the production process. This is why “mass-produced” goods are nearly always less expensive than “hand crafted” items (Swanson, T., 1990).

Specialization came to the countryside long ago. Settled agriculture has usually involved the clearing of diverse habitats and their replacement by one or a few species. Such monocultural ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Wildlife and wildlands: diversity and development
• 2 Economics for the wilds
• 3 Appropriating the value of wildlife and wildlands
• 4 The role of wildlife utilization and other policies for diversity conservation
• 5 Community-based development in Africa
• 6 Wildlife tourism
• 7 Sustainable rainforest utilization
• 8 Wildlife and wildland utilization and conservation
• 9 Illegal exploitation of wildlife
• 10 The end of wildlands and wildlife?
• Index