Ashoka Mukpo: The bottom-line reality is that wildlife rangers around Queen Elizabeth Park don’t have a good reputation. They’re often in some communities, frankly, seen as enemies, and there’s been some efforts, I think, to repair that relationship, but as a general rule, I think people feel that wildlife rangers have a mandate that is to protect wildlife, not for them. But for you know, sort of foreigners and, and this kind of ethereal concept of conservation that’s not really part of anything that’s meant to improve their lives. And the amount of kind of violence and aggressive enforcement that is, I think, generally associated with wildlife rangers has led to a lot of mistrust, a lot of alienation, and in a real sense that the purpose of these people is ‘to kind of harass and impose a system that doesn’t include us on us.’

Mike DiGirolamo (Narration):  Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your cohost, Mike DiGirolamo. Bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account, this podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast, we speak with Ashoka Mukpo, a staff features writer at Mongabay. He joins me to talk about national parks on the African continent, what their presence means for conservation, and their impact on human rights. The UN Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 plan requires countries across the world to expand the amount of land they have under some form of conservation protection. In Africa, that would require the inclusion of nearly a million square miles. Ashoka traveled to three countries in East Africa to look at the current state of conservation in some of these protected areas. Our conversation today focuses on Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, where there have been allegations of killings of suspected bushmeat poachers. Ashoka unpacks this difficult dynamic in modern conservation where protecting threatened species from poaching is often accompanied by tremendous violence, creating an environment of hostility between park rangers and the people who live around them.

Mike: Ashoka, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.

Ashoka: It’s great to be back.

Mike: So, you took a reporting trip to East Africa in late 2023. Can you tell our listeners why you took this trip and what it was for?

Ashoka: Well, you know, aside from the fact that as a conservation reporter, it always helps when you’re on the ground talking to people who are most impacted by conservation, I’d say the reason that we chose this trip, it has a lot to do with the Global Biodiversity Framework, which is this treaty that was passed or ratified in 2022, if I’m not mistaken, that essentially committed the world to increasing the amount of land that’s under conservation protection. And, you know, there’s been a lot of controversy around this because a lot of people are saying, well, where’s this land going to come from? And we thought that a good way to kind of look at the bigger issues related to expanding the amount of conservation land was to look at what’s currently happening right now. And we wanted to choose countries that are very biodiverse and have big tourism industries and where there’s been a lot of conflict around what should conservation look like. And obviously Kenya is kind of at the top of that list because in a lot of ways, what we know as conservation in Africa in particular really originated in Kenya and Rwanda and Uganda as well, because those are both countries that are beautiful, full of rare wildlife and you know, are kind of targeted as important biodiversity hotspots so I think that’s the best answer.

Mike: So, there’s one park in particular, which is called Queen Elizabeth National Park, and it’s in Uganda. And you went there. What did you find there?

Ashoka: So, Uganda was the country that we decided to look at government run national parks. In Kenya, we were looking at kind of community oriented conservancies, which is a newer model. And in Rwanda, kind of public/private—some people call it privatization—by a group called African Parks, but Uganda is a country really where anything that has to do with conservation at this point is almost exclusively under the control of the government and part of what we thought would be important with this project would be to kind of look at the history of how conservation emerged in East Africa and Queen Elizabeth Park, I think, is sort of a really emblematic example.

You know, it’s right in the name, right? It’s in Central Africa, and it’s called Queen Elizabeth Park. So, it’s like, well, how did you get to a point where a big national park in Africa is named after a British monarch and what does that say about sort of the current state of how conservation exists in this landscape. And how do people perceive it?

Mike: hmm. Mm. And you heard some allegations there. Can you describe what those were?

Ashoka: You know, we chose Queen Elizabeth as a park to report on both because it’s incredibly biodiverse. It’s part of what they call the greater Virunga landscape. So a lot of people know Virunga Park. It’s this kind of like gorilla inhabited iconic you know, tropical rainforest and volcano park that’s in the DRC. And really right across the border is a park called Queen Elizabeth in Uganda. And we went there because I’d read a little bit online about some kind of potential evictions that might be happening with some communities that are actually inside the park. And also, because it’s kind of a hotspot for human wildlife conflict, which is a very big issue in conservation. You know, like how people live among and with wildlife. Now while I was there very surprisingly, actually to me, I started to hear a lot of rumors and really just sort of direct allegations that rangers who patrol Queen Elizabeth were also often quite violent. And that felt like that was an important thread to kind of pull on because there’s been so much attention on, militarized conservation and human rights related to conservation management. And so, I wanted to know a little bit more about you know, whether those allegations were true what was going on, if it was common, widespread, you know, if these were just rumors, et cetera, et cetera. And so, we started going to communities and asking people you know what their experience with conservation enforcement was.

Mike: And what did they say their experience was?

Ashoka: So, I think like it’s sort of helpful to step back first and say that the people that run conservation and are kind of nominally and statutorily in charge of conservation in Uganda is this agency called the Uganda Wildlife Authority. And the Uganda wildlife authority is sort of a really good example of what I think people are referring to when they talk about militarized conservation. They wear military uniforms even in their headquarters in Kampala. It’s a very kind of hierarchical organization. They’re very well armed and at Queen Elizabeth but actually all of the major parks in Uganda, Merchantson, Mount Elgin. There are widespread and common allegations of extrajudicial killings, and this is so common, frankly, that I have to say I was quite surprised by how much media reporting there had been on these kind of accusations, not just to Queen Elizabeth, but at a lot of other parks, too. And I want to be careful not to completely demonize UWA because there’s a lot of things that UWA does that is very, very important in terms of protecting and you know, managing these really, really biodiverse areas. But the community allegations of violence, including killing, is widespread and common and really present at just about every park. So what I heard in Queen Elizabeth in particular, in talking to communities that lived kind of up in the hills above the park, is basically that poachers, you know, or depending on how you might sort of see them historically, hunters, when they go into the park to hunt primarily hippos, that’s the major target is hippos and antelopes if they’re seen by UWA obviously, you know, people get arrested and they get sentenced to prison time and the laws are quite stiff, but it’s also not uncommon for people to get shot and killed. And that’s really just the bottom line, and this is so widespread that in one of the towns that I visited, there was a school that had been set up by a group of former poachers to kind of educate and care for children whose fathers had been killed in the park. And this is just one town, and there were 63 kids in it. So, I think that really speaks to this is not, you know, something that happens every so often. It’s something that happens, I think pretty frequently.

Mike: And can you go in a little bit more detail about why communities say it’s happening?

Ashoka: That’s, I think, something that sort of goes back a long way to the sort of history and foundational kind of beginnings of a lot of the, what we know of as conservation in Africa. And I think you can look at it in different ways. I think on one level you can look at it and say you know, there’s been really extreme poaching crises in a lot of parts of East Africa. We all know about the elephant populations being targeted by ivory traffickers and some of this sort of horrendous violence that’s been associated with that. And you know, the decimation of wildlife populations that’s come as a result of that poaching. But this is a history that really goes back you know a century or more to the colonial era when a lot of these national parks were sort of set up to protect ivory revenues for colonial governments and make sure that hunting was exclusively for, you know, Brits and French and some of the sort of colonial governments that were getting a lot of their revenue from ivory. I think that history is important to understand when we get to the today part, which is that a lot of the really heavy militarization that you’ve seen of rangers and wildlife agencies in East Africa is kind of justified and has been justified as a response to rhino and elephant poaching. And again, I want to really make it clear that like, this is a big problem. You know, I mean, we’ve seen huge declines in elephant populations, I think, since 1970, savannah elephants have declined by 70%. And so, this move towards heavy militarization was sort of justified and has been justified as a way of stopping that form of international, you know, high value, very lucrative poaching that often has, you know, government officials and military figures who are involved in it. But what’s really happened, I think, now, and you see this in a park by Queen Elizabeth, is a lot of these sort of poachers and hunters. They’re not targeting species like elephant to get ivory to, you know, make thousands and thousands of dollars in international markets. This is a combination of local bushmeat trade and also tradition, frankly, I mean, people have been hunting hippos in Queen Elizabeth since long before anybody in that area knew who Queen Elizabeth was. And the tactics that they use for this form of poaching, it tends to be groups of men who use spears and nets and hunting dogs. So this is not like, AK 47s and helicopters or whatever, you know, this is sort of very subsistence level traditional hunting, but because conservation itself has become so forceful and so militarized in some parts of Central and East Africa and really across the continent, there’s not often a delineation, I think, between, you know, a dangerous elephant poacher with an automatic rifle and somebody who’s essentially living in abject poverty and is hunting hippos as a sort of like initiation or cultural ritual or because frankly, they really like the taste of hippos. And so, the failure to, I think, differentiate between those two groups has led to quite a lot of violence against, I think people who maybe some of these laws or this drift towards militarized conservation weren’t in people’s minds when it first started to happen. So hopefully that’s not too long winded.

Mike: No, that was a really good explanation of the situation. Now, you spent a good amount of time with both the rangers and also local communities. Can you first describe how locals view the rangers? What were some of the sentiments you were hearing from them?

Ashoka: Right. And I think this is a really sort of sensitive and important dynamic to pull out here because I really don’t want to demonize rangers. I don’t want this to be like wildlife rangers are bad, but I think we also need to be blunt and as journalists you know, objective and honest about what it is that we see and hear when we’re on reporting trips like this. And the bottom-line reality is that wildlife rangers around Queen Elizabeth Park don’t have a good reputation. They’re often in some communities, frankly seen as enemies, and there’s been some efforts, I think, to repair that relationship, both through addressing human wildlife conflict or sensitizing people, you know, like livelihood programs meant to kind of help people earn income. But as a general rule, I think people feel that wildlife rangers have a mandate that is to protect wildlife, not for them. But for you know, sort of foreigners and, and this kind of ethereal concept of conservation that’s not really part of anything that’s meant to improve their lives and the amount of kind of violence and aggressive enforcement that is, I think generally associated with wildlife rangers has led to a lot of mistrust, a lot of alienation, and in a real sense that the purpose of these people is ‘to kind of harass and impose a system that doesn’t include us on us.’ And this isn’t just me saying this actually, there’s a tremendous amount of research that points towards this. It’s available from rangers themselves, actually have been interviewed by social scientists saying that when they go into certain communities for example, they’re very afraid to order food because they worry that the food might be poisoned or that there might be, you know, some kind of way to get them sick by eating it. A lot of them, according to some of this research, they won’t even drink water in some of these communities. So there’s a real sense, I think, of mistrust and a relationship of being in opposition that exists on both sides, both from the communities towards the rangers and from the rangers, I think, in a lot of ways towards the communities. And to sort of like preempt what the next question might be, which would be, how did the Rangers feel? I think this is where I feel like it’s important to say that I’m very sympathetic towards wildlife rangers overall, especially the guys who are you know, working in Queen Elizabeth. First of all, it is the case that sometimes they are in danger. You know, wildlife rangers have been killed and it’s not like elephant poachers with small arms don’t exist.

They do. And so, you know, statistically you see. You know, a few rangers are killed every year. I think one was just killed a few months ago. And also, you know, I spent about a day in the field with them out on patrol in Queen Elizabeth. And these are like really nice guys. You know, they’re really funny. They’re really engaging. They take their work really seriously. And a lot of them said things like. “It’s important for us to protect these animals, because if we don’t do that, in the future, our great grandchildren are going to want to see an elephant, they’re going to want to see a hippo, and if we don’t do our job, there’s not going to be any left.” So, I think a lot of them really do believe in what they’re doing. That said, I think that there’s a system and philosophy that’s been created in a lot of these landscapes. That’s not really of their own design. That puts them in a position that they have to be quite aggressive or, you know, the culture and some social scientists and researchers that I spoke to talked a lot about the training that these rangers get put through as you know, talking about poachers as ‘the enemy.’ And a lot of it is very militarized. It’s like, you know, designed by Western military trainers and private military companies to focus almost on counterinsurgency tactics. And what I heard people who are familiar and knowledgeable about those trainings would say to me is, “is that really the appropriate way to be discussing community people who tend to be poor and are doing subsistence poaching by framing them as the enemy?” And I think this sort of like, momentum and philosophy behind this training can orient them towards an approach that isn’t just, you know, often very violent, I think it might actually be sort of self-defeating.

Mike: Now you did highlight somewhere in your reporting that there were instances where there was a bit more collaboration with the community, for instance, with like installing elephant fences. Can you expand more on that? What was going on there?

Ashoka: And I think that this is also something that’s sort of interesting. I always hate to, you know, you want to like have there be a simple narrative around all this, but there’s always so much complexity. So even when we say communities at Queen Elizabeth, there’s a lot of different types of people. There’s different ethnic groups. There are people who’ve been in that region for centuries and there’s people who showed up 20 years ago, 30 years ago, attracted to new economic activities. And so, what I think you’ve seen is that like, particularly with human wildlife conflict, there’s not really a one size fits all answer. So some communities are dealing with one thing. Some communities are dealing with another. You have some communities where hunting is a big part of their traditional culture. And then you have some communities where farming is much more of like the way that they make their money and their livelihoods and for farming communities. Around Queen Elizabeth, the big kind of frustration that they’ve had with the park is that elephants will often kind of cross over the boundaries into their areas and eat their crops. I think this is sort of like, a revealing and I wouldn’t call it funny because it’s really quite serious to have an elephant show up unannounced in your backyard. I mean, you know, you might think of that as kind of comical, but it’s actually, it’s a life-threatening situation. I think we tend to have this idea of elephants as these, like, beautiful, majestic, and sort of, like, whimsical creatures, which they are, and they have, like, a real diversity of personalities, but they can also do a lot of damage. And if you’re someone who’s living on the edge of poverty, if an elephant comes across you know, your fence, your gate, and eats all of your cassava or your beans or whatever, that really can sort of destroy your income. So, UWA has been trying to finance these electric fences and they’ve been building, you know, I think at this point it’s like close to a hundred kilometers worth of them. And this is an area that’s worked really well in terms of their relationship with at least the communities that do farming because, you know, when you don’t have to worry about an elephant or a hippo cratering your income and destroying your farm and property, then it’s a lot easier to appreciate their intrinsic value. And this is an important point because I think that this is a problem that’s going to become more and more evident across Africa. How do you balance, you know, farming and other economic activities with the you know, when conservation is successful, it means there’s more animals that can do more damage.

Mike DiGirolamo (Narration):  Hey listeners. Thank you as always for tuning into the Mongabay Newscast. If you’re listening to this episode on your browser, we encourage you to subscribe to the Newscast on the podcast platform of your choice. And no matter where you’re listening, please leave a review. Doing this helps elevate our show’s profile and brings us to a wider audience. But if you’re looking for other ways to support the Newscast, you can donate to us in the upper right hand corner of mongabay.com by clicking on the donate button. We are a nonprofit newsroom and rely on the generosity of our readers and listeners. Thanks again. And now back to our conversation with Ashoka Mukpo.

Mike: So how much money is Queen Elizabeth bringing into Uganda a year?

Ashoka: That’s like I think a really important dynamic of this story or really anything to do with conservation and particularly national parks in Africa, which is that, you know, nature has intrinsic value on its own. It’s beautiful. It’s sort of like life affirming to be close to it. And I think that we can see that while also cognating that they’re also very valuable assets. And that really matters both in terms of on the good side you know, that’s how you finance conservation is you need revenue streams that come from, for example, tourists, and then sort of the, I wouldn’t necessarily call it the bad side, but the alternative side of that coin is that when something’s valuable then you have to start thinking about who is capturing that value, where’s that value going and who’s kind of excluded from that value formation. So. Tourism overall in Uganda, I think is worth about a billion dollars a year, which is close to 10 percent of its GDP. That’s not small. That’s a huge industry. And the majority of that revenue comes from national parks. So I think Queen Elizabeth, on its own, just through entrance fees I think it’s about 5 or 10 million a year, somewhere in that. But that’s only a small proportion of the total value that the park creates. You know, it’s creating value for safari operators, for tour guides, for lodges, for hospitality caterers. There’s so many different components of what we call the wildlife economy that are present in a park like Queen Elizabeth. So that also I think is a factor whenever we talk about militarized conservation or conservation laws or human rights abuses. Or any of the kind of like dark sides of conservation, it’s really important to understand these as, you know, revenue generating assets. So, this is a little bit counterintuitive for people, but I’ve always kind of, said, I think, you know, this is something I always say that’s important to understand is that in some sort of broader sense, like a national park isn’t necessarily that different from a plantation or a mine. Obviously, that’s going to be like, “what are you talking about?” And yes, you know, the model on a national park is that you’re protecting nature as opposed to the other two where it involves its destruction. But the reason why the government has an interest in protecting nature is not that different why it has an interest in the destruction of nature at a plantation. Both generate revenue just in different ways. And so that kind of flow of revenue and the economics and financial realities of these assets determines a lot about how the government sees them, you know, how they control them, who’s allowed to participate and who’s not. And I think that’s an important piece of the dynamic to consider.

Mike: And so, they’re quoted in the story as saying as such, but people that you spoke with say they are not getting the benefit of that revenue. They’re cut out from it. Did any rangers you speak with sympathize with that?

Ashoka: Listen, these guys, they sympathize deeply. And I think again, I want to keep saying that like the rangers are not you know, just out to be sadists and beat people up. I think what I heard people say is that there are sort of good apples and bad apples, like in, in fact, and this makes sense, you know, it’s just like, I think policing anywhere that people will say, well, that guy’s really nice. We love him. And that guy, you know, you don’t want to see him. But the rangers that I spoke to, they were especially off camera and off mic, they were like, look, I understand it. It doesn’t feel good. when we walk into one of these communities and people are like, “get outta here. You know, we don’t like that, but what, what can we do? That’s our job.” And the revenue sharing thing is, is also you know, again, there’s nothing that’s simple. There’s nothing that’s like super straightforward here. There’s a law in the books in Uganda that 20% Of all the revenues from any national park gets spent on development projects in communities near the park. So that’s a big chunk of money, especially in an area that’s so low, low income is what’s around Queen Elizabeth. Problem is that what you hear people say is that that money gets misspent. So, it gets given to district officials and sort of, you know, kind of like middle tier leaders in the county. And then that money doesn’t always reach people in a way that they feel that it’s transformative. You can’t blame that on UWA, and actually, UWA is very distressed over this, and in some years they’ve threatened to withhold the money. But I think it just goes to show that it’s like, this sort of top down model of, “okay, we’re going to compensate you for losses or for, you know, whatever impact the park is having on you financially or otherwise by kind of giving you some share of the proceeds.” It’s not always that simple because then if people don’t feel that it’s really making an impact, it can actually kind of like worsen. There are frustrations. There was definitely a little bit of that going on there. And then at the same time, there are some people who are getting support from either UWA or other NGOs that are present that will tell you that they feel like it’s really transformative. So it’s a mixed bag.

Mike: Yeah. This might sound like an overly simple question, but what’s unique about the situation in Queen Elizabeth and also what’s not unique about it? Like, what is not unique about this that we see in other contexts?

Ashoka: That, I think that like sort of the answer to that is that it’s not unique. And this is important. You know, when there was the big WWF scandal around Solonga and some of the parks in the Republic of Congo. I think there was a tendency for people to feel like, okay, this is just a few bad parks or you know, I heard this sort of blamed that the DRCs security culture is so violent due to years of conflict and war that, you know, you’re seeing things that are much harsher there than you would see in other areas. And I think what the reporting in Uganda should indicate to people is that these problems of excessively brutal and harsh enforcement are really present across the continent. And it’s not just one park. It’s not just one agency. It has a lot to do with the system and the culture that’s in place around conservation. What I think is also important to understand is that these models of kind of old style national parks that were set up mostly in the colonial era, is shifting a little bit in other parts of the continent towards more community oriented models. And later stories in this series are gonna focus on those. And, you know, they also have their own problems. There’s really no, you know, one magic bullet. I keep telling people that it’s like everything has pros and cons, but on the whole I would say that Queen Elizabeth is kind of, it’s unique in a biodiversity sense. I mean, you know, there’s other places that are like it, but I think that all of these landscapes have their own inherent beauty that’s not replicated in a different one. You know, there’s connections to the land that people have there and specific kind of habitats and behavior of you know, wildlife. But in a way, I think that part of why it’s such a good park to focus on is that it’s emblematic of so many other parks on the continent.

Mike: So, what other regions are you going to be visiting and reporting on if you’re able to divulge any kind of detail about that?

Ashoka: So, we will in the next couple of months be publishing a series of pieces from Rwanda too, which I think is really timely because Rwanda is sort of involved in what’s very fast turning into an open conflict with the DRC and the park that we visited was very close to that border. So, there was a lot of kind of like security issues related to it too. But in that park, what we wanted to look at is this sort of emerging well, you’d call public/private model where an NGO or a company will kind of sign an agreement with a government where it won’t be their agency that does the policing that actually this, you know, this sort of foreign entity will come in and do everything. They set up tourism operations, they finance rangers, they do community relations and it’s in partnership with the government, but it’s a much more kind of, I think it’s fair to call it a much more privatized model. And so that’s where Rwanda is going to focus on it. And then after that we’re going to take folks to Kenya to look at the operations of a very big very controversial conservation organization called the Northern Rangelands Trust, which has been in the news a lot over the last four years for a lot of different reasons. And they help communities or encourage communities to set up these wildlife conservancies that are nominally kind of controlled by the community. So, it’s not the same model as like, like NRT doesn’t run all these conservancies. They help people set them up. But what you’re seeing is a lot of conflict internally in the communities around what it means to run a wildlife conservancy. You know, there’s a very, very difficult landscape up in northern Kenya. And so, we’re really excited to explore that. And you know, hopefully bring people some good storytelling and compelling content around everything that’s going on up there.

Mike: Well, Ashoka Mukpo, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I wish you the best out there, and good luck. We’ll see you when you get back.

Ashoka: Thanks so much, Mike. Keep up the good work.

Mike DiGirolamo (Narration):  I encourage you to read Ashoka’s features on protected areas in East Africa. Parts one and two are linked in the show notes and summary of this episode. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please leave us a review and share this podcast with your network and your friends. And you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor at patreon.com/Mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet. So even if you pledge a dollar per month, that makes a big difference and it helps us offset production costs. So, if you’re a fan of our audio reports from nature’s frontline, go to patreon.com/Mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline at Mongabay.com, or you can follow with us on social media, find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube @MongabayTV. Thanks as always for listening.