The Minister of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, Pohamba Shifeta said the government is exploring avenues on how Namibia can benefit from the large volume of ivory and rhino horn stockpiles, despite the global trade ban of these products.

Speaking during the commemoration of World Rhino Day at Okaukuejo in the Etosha National Park on Friday, Shifeta said the Constitution stipulates the need for beneficiation from the country’s natural resources, including rhino and elephant products, which Namibia has in abundant stockpiles.

“We can manage and conserve our natural resources but equally we need to sustainably utilise them and with that constitutional base, Government is looking at all other avenues to ensure that what we have in our banks, whether ivory or rhino horns, by all means we dispose of them and we get money from there,” he said.

Namibia is signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) which prohibits the sale of ivory and rhino horns.

Shifeta stressed that managing the stockpile and owning of rhino for both Government and private owners is very cumbersome and costly, hence the government is finding frameworks to incentivise farmers on conservation to increase rhino population growth for sustainable utilisation for economic growth.

“We feel it as a government that it is very expensive to manage a black rhino for security and feeding, now that there is drought it costs the owner so much every month, therefore if the owner has no incentives or income the population will go down because no one will want to have a liability. We are trying to assess the CITES convention to internally see what mechanism we can establish to incentivise our farmers who own these rhinos so that we also increase our population,” he noted.

At the same event, Shifeta launched the Rhino Management Plans and use of 13 horses aimed at combating crime against poaching in the Etosha National Park and Waterberg Plateau Park, noting that thus far, 39 rhinos have been poached in 2023 compared to 92 poached in 2022.

Fifty were killed in 2021, 47 in 2020 and 61 in 2019.

Without giving the current rhino population statistics, Shifeta noted that all black rhinos remain state-owned and those occurring on private land as well as some communal conservancies have been placed there under the black rhino custodianship programme, while white rhino occur both in private and public ownership.

Source: The Namibian Press Agency