The drivers and extent of poison use by Namibia's communal farmers: Implications for averting the African vulture crisis

Abstract

The use of poison by farmers to control livestock predators is a major threat to vulture populations across Eurasia and Africa. While there is now some understanding of poison use on freehold farmland regions in southern Africa, the prevalence and drivers of this practice are still unknown in communal farmlands. We surveyed 353 communal farmers in Namibia to assess the prevalence of reported poison use and intended poison use and the factors associated with both. We used the Randomised Response Technique, a method deemed to yield more robust estimates of the prevalence of sensitive behaviours compared to direct questioning. We found 1.7% of communal farmers admitted to using poison in the last year. Furthermore, across the study region, predicted poison use was the highest (up to 7%) in areas of the upper north-west. The identified 'hotspots' of poison use will assist conservation practitioners to focus their poison-mitigation efforts centred in the areas of the highest need.

Keywords: African vulture crisis; Communal; Conservancy; Farmer; Human–wildlife conflict; Poison use.

Fig. 1

The predicted prevalence (on a scale from zero, behaviour is absent, to 1, behaviour present across all farmers) of reported poison use (a) and intention to use poison (b) in the communal farmlands of Namibia. These interpolated maps were derived from the model-averaged predictions based on the 95% confidence set of models on actual and intention to use poison (see “Materials and Methods” and Table 2). Protected areas are highlighted in grey, whereas administrative regions of Namibia are delimited by dark grey continuous lines. Areas in white represent freehold or other areas outside of the study scope

Fig. 2

The predicted prevalence of reported poison use in the communal and freehold farmlands of Namibia, using data from (Santangeli et al. 2016). Note the difference in scale compared to Fig. 1a