The optimal combination of pastoral activities and wildlife conservation in the Serengeti ecosystem

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. Both pastoralists and park agencies must limit the amount of effort engaged in extensive livestock production and wildlife conservation, as this translates into increased demand for land by either party.In terms of welfare, a combination of antipoaching effort by the parks agency and poaching effort by the pastoralists that exceed optimum levels results in a decrease in social welfare.Increasing extensive livestock production entails greater demand for grazing space, which must be offset by a reduction in protected acreage; this, too, poses a risk of species extinction.Given that the current size of the Serengeti's wildlife stock may be near optimal, the goal of wildlife policy should be to simultaneously reduce the incentives for resource managers to exert excessive antipoaching effort to maintain a healthy wildlife population while also reducing incentives for the pastoralist community to overstock livestock.