Abstract:
There is competition for land between Maasai pastoralists
and the park agency in the Serengeti ecosystem.
The park agency wants to use the land for wildlife
conservation while the pastoralist community wants to
use it for livestock grazing. Predatory wildlife kills
livestock while herbivorous wildlife competes with
livestock for water and grazing. In retaliation, the
Maasai hunt predators and grazers to protect their
livestock and also to supply the black market for
wildlife products. With both the Maasai and animal
populations growing, increased conflicts are inevitable.
This paper develops a bioeconomic model with three
animal species to analyse the optimal combination of
pastoral activities and wildlife conservation in the
Serengeti ecosystem. Using Pontryagin's maximum
principle, the market problem for each agent is
optimized and compared to the social planner's outcome. Results show that the market solutions are
suboptimal because of negative externalities affecting
both agents and inadequate regard to biodiversity
conservation values. Mathematical simulations of the
bioeconomic model are used to generate a solution in which the Maasai pastoralists and park agency can
optimally share the land for their mutual benefit. The
policy implication is that the government should
establish an independent regulatory institution with a
primary mandate of balancing the contested socioeconomic
and ecological needs of stakeholders in
prime ecosystems such as the Serengeti.
