The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  Chapter 20. South Africa: Green Grab

  Anton Rupert, who died in 2006, was a chemical engineer and billionaire. He created the Rembrandt tobacco empire, bought the British Rothmans brand, and became an influential member of the secretive Boer organization known as the Broederbond, which had a lot of influence in South Africa during the apartheid era. Less well known, even in South Africa, is that for two decades he also bankrolled the world’s premier conservation organization, WWF, during a period when it policed and managed many of the planet’s protected areas, engaging in what even insiders regarded as a pernicious form of “green grab.” For much of that time, his personal nominee was running the organization.

  Rupert took up conservation in the 1960s, first protecting traditional Afrikaner architecture and then his country’s wildlife. He spread his wings initially thanks to his friend Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who had been president of WWF since its creation in 1961. With WWF perennially short of funds, they hit on the idea of creating a $10 million endowment fund called “The 1001: A Nature Trust.” The Trust, formed in 1970, set out to recruit 1,001 members who would contribute $10,000 each—$10 million in all. Rupert gave the job of finding them to a rising young Belgian businessman at Rothmans, Charles de Haes.

  “Charles traveled the world using Rothman boardrooms and a Rothman expense account, and with Prince Bernhard’s calling card in his pocket,” says Fritz Vollmar, WWF’s director-general at the time. Within three years, de Haes—who was by now working for WWF, though reporting only to Rupert—had his 1,001 members. The brotherhood, whose membership has always been anonymous, continues. Many of its members are South African or Dutch. Most are businesspeople. New recruits replace members as they die. The perks include exclusive receptions with European royalty and excursions to top wildlife sites. As author Elspeth Huxley put it in her biography of WWF founder Sir Peter Scott, “Gold-plated shoulders could rub together, generally in the presence of a prince of the blood.” I met a bunch of them once, living it up on the shores of the Banc d’Arguin, a breathtaking bird sanctuary in Mauritania virtually never visited by outsiders.

  In 1975, with the Trust established as the paymaster for most of WWF International’s staff, Rupert and Bernhard installed de Haes as director-general of the organization, a job he held for eighteen years. It only emerged later that, for much of his tenure, and at the height of global anger about apartheid, de Haes remained on the payroll of Rupert rather than WWF itself.

  In effect, Rupert had taken over. His Trust funded WWF’s growth into the world’s premier conservation organization. By the early 1980s, it could boast that it was involved in the planning and management of 260 parks and reserves on five continents covering more than 580,000 square miles—1 percent of the planet’s land surface. Many of them were in Africa, where host governments would have been appalled, in the era of apartheid, to know that they were collaborating with such a figure.

  Rupert’s influence was evident in what Hans Hussy, a Swiss lawyer and one of WWF’s five founders in 1961, described to me as WWF’s “extremely conservative and traditional” approach to conservation. Some of the organization’s other founders shared a similarly conservative outlook, which critics describe as “fortress conservation.” They included its two royal founders, Bernhard and Britain’s Prince Philip. But by the 1970s it was Rupert who held the purse strings and called the shots.

  With his man in charge, people were expelled from parks (unless they were paying tourists, of course) and poachers were hunted down, sometimes literally. During the Rupert years, some of the continent’s most unsavory characters joined the 1001 Club. They included President Idi Amin of Uganda and President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. Their countries were responsible for some of the more outrageous expulsions as traditional lands of tribal groups and others were grabbed for conservation.

  From 1982, Zaire and Uganda were a focus of intense WWF activity to defend primates in general and mountain gorillas in particular. To that end, the Batwa “pygmies” of central Africa lost most of their hunting lands to national parks. They were replaced by tourists paying to see mountain gorillas. In southwest Uganda, the Batwa were banished from the 8,000 acres of the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park and the 80,000 acres of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.

  Today, almost two decades after WWF helped create these parks, “these communities continue to live in wretched conditions . . . as squatters on land purchased for them by charitable organisations . . . and face extreme marginalisation and discrimination,” according to a recent report by the Rights and Resources Initiative. They watch from squalid roadside camps as tourists drive by wielding $30-a-day permits to visit gorillas in land that was once theirs.

  A later internal history of WWF, Treading Lightly, admitted that “too often in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, WWF helped organize the expulsion of tribal groups from their land on the pretext of preserving wildlife. The result . . . was often to alienate the very people who had successfully shared the land with big game for centuries.”

  At the time, WWF appeared to be operating as a paramilitary force in Africa. It paid for helicopter gunships that shot down poachers in Kenya. And, in an exercise known as Operation Lock, WWF staff were involved in a Bernhard-funded scheme to hire the British mercenary David Stirling to hunt down ivory poachers and traffickers in Namibia and Mozambique. The mercenaries, who had close ties to South African defense forces, became involved in smuggling themselves.

  Few of the organization’s outside supporters knew that the funding and the strategy for these activities often came from the Rupert connection. But there was internal unease. As Luc Hoffmann, a founding vice president whose family owned the Hoffmann LaRoche chemicals empire, told me in the 1990s: “We paid too little attention to policy activities. They can achieve much more than buying land.” Eventually the unease turned to revolt. Hussy, who headed the Swiss chapter, was one of its leaders.

  De Haes was removed in 1993 after a quiet internal coup. A new generation of activists was determined to end WWF’s reputation as a green land grabber. “We don’t want to be an organization with billions of dollars to spend buying up the world,” Claude Martin, de Haes’s successor, told me at the time. “There is no point in creating protected areas if they fail to recognize the requirements of the people who live in or around them. That can only lead to conflict and reduce the chances of success.” Environmentalism, Martin warned in 1995, was “beginning to look just as narrow and selfish as the imperialists of old.” On his watch, quintessential imperialist figureheads like Kes Smith, an English zoologist, and her Zimbabwean game-warden husband, Fraser—who were said to have effectively ruled more than a million acres of the Congolese Garamba park on behalf of its northern white rhinos for fourteen years—were withdrawn. “The idea is now that the Congolese run things in Garamba and elsewhere,” WWF’s African head told me in 1998.

  The new generation also had new ideas about ecology, especially in Africa. They did not see the need for the rigorous separation of humans and wildlife accepted as axiomatic by their predecessors. In fact, they acknowledged that many of the African habitats regarded by their predecessors as Pleistocene landscapes were in fact a product of the interaction of humans, their livestock, and wildlife.

  Holly Dublin was chief conservation adviser for the WWF in Nairobi in the 1990s, and author of a study of the changing ecology of Kenya’s Maasai Mara national reserve, part of the Serengeti ecosystem. “It was not until the 1980s,” says Dublin, “that we began to see that the natural ecology of African savannahs was much more dynamic, involving massive changes in the space of a decade or two, switching between woodland and grassland.” That natural system involved wild animals, cattle, and occasional interventions from bush fires. “Pastoralists have herded their cattle in harmony with wildlife for thousands of years.” Of course that did not mean there were no human pressures. But it did mean that the Maasai, and the many oth
er traditional users of Africa’s grasslands, were not the enemy—they were the landscape’s experts and the likely source of solutions to its environmental problems.

  Rupert was undeterred by this revisionist thinking. In the late 1990s, with his man deposed at WWF, he started another elite conservation club to protect his vision of wild Africa. This time the “Club 21” had an entry fee of a million dollars. Most of the first group of twenty-one sponsors were corporations, including De Beers, DaimlerChrysler, and Cartier, large philanthropic bodies like the Rothschild Foundation, and several organizations chaired by Rupert or his eldest son Johann. Individuals shelling out their money included the Dutch industrialist and conservationist Paul van Vlissingen and, later, Richard Branson and Ted Turner.

  Club 21’s purpose was to fund a new body, the Peace Parks Foundation, founded by Rupert and Prince Bernhard. This was something of a rehabilitation for Prince Bernhard, who had been forced to resign from WWF in 1976 after he was revealed to have taken a million-dollar bribe from the plane manufacturer Lockheed to influence the Dutch government. The Foundation was set up “to facilitate the establishment of trans-frontier conservation areas, also called peace parks.” It is based in the Afrikaner heartland city of Stellenbosch, where Rupert lived until his death in 2006, after which Johann took over the reins. Its founding board was made up almost entirely of South African friends of Rupert and Dutch friends of Bernhard, several of them also members of Club 21. Its first director was John Hanks, a veteran of WWF in Africa, who had taken responsibility for Operation Lock when it was exposed in 1991.

  This foundation has initiated plans for cross-border parks involving every southern African country as far north as Tanzania, and has treaties creating them that involve South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. One journalist hailed it as “an ecological Cape to Cairo dream.” Its main accomplishment on the ground so far is the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, essentially a cross-border extension of the Kruger Park in South Africa into Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It covers 8.5 million acres. The parks authorities say that it is trying, in Hanks words, to “right the wrongs of the past,” including those from the apartheid era. But that hasn’t prevented them from “resettling” some seven thousand people in the Mozambique portion. Back in South Africa, the people of Makuleke, who were expelled from Kruger Park when it was expanded in 1969, have now had their land rights reinstated—but they agreed not to reoccupy their land inside the park.

  Rupert and Bernhard are now dead. So too is their friend and fellow green grabber, the Dutch industrialist Paul van Vlissingen. Aside from his place on the founding board of the Peace Parks Foundation and membership of Club 21, Vlissingen was, on his own account, the largest private operator of African national parks. He put $18 million of his own money into kick-starting his African Parks Foundation, which he began in 2000. His foundation was dedicated to taking over ailing national parks and putting them on a sound management and commercial footing. Its seven parks today are in Malawi, Zambia, Chad, both Congos, and Rwanda and cover some 8.1 million acres. They include the Garamba park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), an ironic privatization given WWF’s determination a decade ago to give it back to its national government.

  I met Vlissingen in 2005 at his castle near Utrecht. It was a few months before he died. He was not a fortress conservationist. But he found that some of the governments he worked with were. In 2004, he began negotiations with the Ethiopian government to take over running its Nechisar National Park, close to the border with Kenya. The Ethiopians wanted to create a Kenyan-style wildlife park to service a Kenyan-style tourist industry. They insisted that, to achieve the ultimate safari experience for Western visitors, they needed to throw the traditional inhabitants out of the park. They wanted wildlife without people. The park would be surrounded by an electric fence to keep the locals from even passing through on the way to the nearest town, already a day’s walk away.

  Vlissingen refused to carry out expulsions. So in February 2005, in the weeks before he took over the park, the Ethiopian military escorted some five thousand people from the Kore tribe from their thatched huts and dumped them on distant land owned by other rural communities. No compensation, no nothing. The government said they were squatters. Another group, the Guji tribe, and their twenty thousand cattle were also targeted. Their huts were burned. The park fence went up. Vlissingen’s park managers took charge.

  Vlissingen told me: “We said that we could work with people in the park, as we do in Zambia, but they said no. We didn’t want to be involved in the resettlement, so I put a clause in the contract that said we wouldn’t take over the park until the resettlement was completed.” In the event, after Vlissingen’s death, one of the Guji groups returned to the park. The foundation negotiated a deal with them for sharing the park, as Vlissingen had originally envisaged. But the government refused to sanction the deal. And in 2007, the foundation pulled out.

  It is hardly surprising that conservation and human rights come into conflict. More than a billion people live in the top twenty-five biodiversity “hotspots.” Usually, the people living in those hotspots are the poorest and most vulnerable, who have been squeezed to the margins of society—to the remote places where nature survives because human infrastructure is little developed. Often too, they are indigenous people. About half of the parks and other areas protected for nature in the past forty years overlap the traditional territories of indigenous people. In Latin America, the figure is 86 percent. In the cause of conservation, many have been thrown off their land.

  Marcus Colchester, director of the UK-based Forest Peoples Programme, says: “Conservation has immeasurably worsened the lives of indigenous peoples through Africa.” He reckons that forest dwellers and indigenous people have altogether lost around 400,000 square miles across the continent—more than four times the area of Britain—as a result of green grabs. Kai Schmidt-Soltau, a Swiss social scientist at the International Network on Displacement and Resettlement in Tucson, Arizona, put the number of “conservation refugees” created around the world in recent decades at “upwards of 120,000.”

  Such calculations are controversial. They greatly anger conservation groups, who mostly flat-out deny involvement in expulsions. Schmidt-Soltau says that fourteen thousand people were expelled from thirteen parks created in Gabon in 2002. The parks are now helping the country advertise itself as a green tourist destination. But the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and WWF, which both supported the creation of the parks, say the park boundaries were deliberately set to avoid inhabited areas. Bryan Curran at WCS said categorically in 2009: “Not a single individual has been physically removed from any of the protected areas created in central Africa over the past decade.” He accuses Schmidt-Soltau and a “small but highly productive body of researchers” of publishing and repeating lies by claiming the expulsions continue.

  Partly, this is a dispute about definitions. Many of those evicted from parks and other protected areas are regarded by their governments and conservationists as squatters, because whatever their traditional rights, they have no formal title to the land. That was the case with the Kore and Guji in Ethiopia’s Nechisar park. And Christine MacDonald reported in Green Inc., her inside account of working for Conservation International, that that organization actively encouraged the Liberian government to evict people living in Sapo National Park after the civil war there, because they were “squatters.”

  Evicted squatters would not count as refugees. And note Curran’s phrase about people not being “physically removed.” That would not include people who were persuaded with inducements to leave their land, or who left because park rules meant they could no longer hunt or harvest the fruits of the forest. Many international refugee agencies would include all these people as environmental refugees. They also include people who did not move at all, but have part of their traditional environment-based livelihoods taken from them.


  Thus in Gabon’s Lope National Park, WCS denies there are any conservation refugees, since “no villages existed within the park when it was created.” But equally, some two thousand Bongo pygmy people who lived outside the park lost their ancestral rights to harvest its resources when the park was created. Curran concedes that definitions about environmental refugees differ. But he says critics of conservation are still misleading—especially when reports by Schmidt-Soltau and others are littered with pejorative phrases such as “brutal eviction.”

  In recent years, a new generation of conservationists in WWF and elsewhere has tried to limit the damage to indigenous people, eliminating expulsions and finding ways for them to benefit directly from conservation. They say this is both ethical and more likely to deliver successful environmental results. The end of Rupert’s rule at WWF helped this trend. So did the 1992 Earth Summit, which urged a new era of “sustainable development.” But has the talk turned into successful projects? Chris Sandbrook of Britain’s University of Cambridge found “a startling lack of data.” Whatever their sustainability rhetoric, very few conservation projects trouble to “measure the impacts of their work for either conservation or poverty alleviation.” Curran admits that “to date there have been few long-term studies of the effectiveness of protected areas for biodiversity conservation, nor their impact on local societies.” With billions of dollars spent over many decades on thousands of biodiversity projects covering millions of acres and affecting the lives of millions of people, this is an alarming admission.