Namibia, facing drought, plans to kill elephants for meat

The southern African nation of Namibia is planning to butcher hundreds of its most majestic animals to feed some of the 1.4 million people – nearly half the country – who are in a hunger crisis amid the worst drought in a century.

The plan, under which the country will kill 723 wild animals, including 83 elephants, to feed people, is “necessary” and “in line with our constitutional mandate where our natural resources are used for the benefit of Namibian citizens,” the country’s ministry of environment, forestry and tourism said in a news release.

This strategy is not unheard-of. “Well-managed, sustainable harvesting of healthy wild animal populations can be a precious source of food for communities,” Rose Mwebaza, the director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Africa Office, wrote in an email.

Much of southern Africa is being affected by drought. More than 30 million people across the region are affected, the U.N. World Food Program said in June.

Droughts are common in southern Africa, and the region has experienced several in the past decade, including from 2018 to 2021, Benjamin Suarato, a spokesperson for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in an email. But this one has been especially devastating and widespread across the region, said Juliane Zeidler, the country director of the World Wildlife Fund in Namibia.

“There is no food,” Zeidler said Thursday. “There is no food for people and there is no food for animals.”

That’s in large part because of El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern that is often associated with warmer, drier weather in parts of the world. It returned last year and “has led to a record-breaking drought with some parts of the region receiving less than half the annual rainfall,” Suarato said.

As the drought dries out staple crops and kills livestock in the region, Namibia is looking past agriculture to its wild animals for food.

In addition to elephants, the country also plans to butcher 300 zebras, 30 hippos, 50 impalas, 60 buffaloes, 100 blue wildebeest and 100 elands (a type of antelope).

The animals are not just being killed for meat. Namibia is also trying to minimize dangerous encounters with humans which, it said, would be expected to increase during the drought as animals and humans sought out water and vegetation. (Though elephants are herbivores, they can be deadly. They killed at least 50 people in Zimbabwe last year, Reuters reported.)

Usually, animals would migrate in cases of severe drought, Zeidler said.

“But as the drought becomes nationwide,” she said, “there is limited space to migrate to.”

The situation is dire. Last week, a United Nations spokesperson said that 84% of Namibia’s food resources were “already exhausted.”

And this is also a particularly tough time of year.

The U.S. aid agency, which announced an additional $4.9 million in humanitarian assistance last month, said that July through September is the “peak of the lean season, when food is scarcest.”

Namibia’s turn to wild game is nothing new. People in the region eat at least some of the animals listed in the environmental ministry’s cull list, like zebra, blue wildebeest and impala, according to a recent Namibian government report on the country’s game meat industry.

Eating wild game is common across the world, Mwebaza said, adding that the sustainable consumption of bush meat is allowed under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

“Provided the harvesting of these animals is done using scientifically proven, sustainable methods that consider animal welfare and are in line with both domestic and international commitments and legislation, there should be no cause for concern,” Mwebaza wrote.

Already, at least 157 animals have been killed, and the ministry said that their carcasses have yielded about 63 tons of meat.

Namibian officials say that they also hope to mitigate the effect of the drought on wildlife, saying that the hunt would focus on places where animals are taxing the water and grazing resources.

Elephants, which can stand more than 13 feet tall and weigh more than 13,000 pounds, consume an especially large amount of those resources. They can eat, on average, about 300 pounds of vegetation a day, Zeidler said.

Extreme drought killed at least 160 elephants in Zimbabwe’s largest national park by January and 300 elephants in Botswana last year, according to Reuters. WWF Namibia is working to raise funds to get water to elephants and other species in several national parks.

A large conservation reserve across Namibia and four other southern African countries includes the world’s largest population of African savanna elephants, which are endangered and whose population has more than halved over the last three generations. But in this reserve in recent years, the elephant population was broadly stable, at more than 227,000 elephants, according to a 2022 survey.

But now, with the severe drought, those populations are under threat, and sometimes moving closer to human civilizations.

“Sometimes, you become victim to your own success,” Zeidler said. “In years and situations of harshness, it’s a bit more difficult to deal, then, with these human-wildlife conflicts.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.