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From Susie Watts

I must take issue with the description of Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme as “successful” in your article on the best use of conservation funds (1 March, p 32).

Research on the programme carried out a few years ago by USAID, the US government’s international development agency, concluded that without the millions of American aid dollars that have been poured in to prop up this supposedly sustainable and self-sufficient programme, the entire edifice would have collapsed.

Most of CAMPFIRE’s lobbying effort has concentrated on the international ivory trade, yet the money received from ivory sales when Zimbabwe was finally permitted to sell ivory to Japan fell far short of the donor aid that funded its lobbying effort.

Donor money is still central to the programme. I suspect this is partly because most donor governments’ conservation policy is directed towards “sustainable utilisation” – a policy that has contributed almost nothing to the conservation of natural resources.

The political situation in Zimbabwe has highlighted another weakness. Some of the worst wildlife poaching in the past two years has occurred in the area where CAMPFIRE had achieved some measure of success, and where money from wildlife hunting and similar activities has been reaching people at village level.

This casts doubt on the theory that receiving money from hunting and other forms of consumptive utilisation provides a strong enough incentive to conserve wildlife. As your article points out, simply providing an injection of cash is no guarantee that people will not take the money and simply carry on as normal.

Marcham, Oxfordshire, UK