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New research published in the journal Wildlife Research argues that hunting in South Africa has an impact of $2.5-billion on the economy. North-West University researchers Peet van der Merwe and Andrea Saayman are the authors. Ed Stoddard at Daily Maverick repeated their estimated figure and claimed that “this is a significantly larger sum than previous estimates, underscoring the importance of hunting to a barely growing economy that faces many challenges.”
The researchers also repeat the now-standard trope that the multiplier effects of hunting benefit the rural poor. In a context of high unemployment, they argue, its value should be taken seriously: “It is especially among the lower-skilled occupations where a large proportion (60.2%) of job opportunities depend on hunting tourism.” In other words, the poor must be grateful for some meat and tiny amounts of revenue (about 6.2% of the total estimated value accrues to low-income earners, according to table 9 in the paper). The standard line among pro-hunting proponents, including Stoddard, is that “the tracks of its [hunting’s] economic and conservation value are in plain sight. There is a reason South Africa’s government and other African governments oppose trophy hunting bans sought by mostly non-Africans up north.”
The problem for Stoddard and other hunting apologists like Van Der Merwe and Saayman (who employ this narrative that hunting benefits poor communities) is a robust peer-reviewed paper just published in Biological Conservation by Moorhouse and others: “We interviewed 1,551 households across 12 communities (adjacent to Kruger National Park). The vast majority of respondents supported protecting wildlife and non-consumptive wildlife use and opposed consumptive uses of wildlife.”
This sample size is at least 3.74 times bigger than Van Der Merwe and Saayman’s. The respondents also have no vested interest in the results and therefore no reason to overstate their case.
The authors conclude: “In the context of trophy hunting, our work provides a vital counterpoint to previous studies, by showing that not only are attitudes and willingness-to-pay among international visitors to South Africa sufficient to replace the revenue from trophy hunting, but that attitudes to wildlife and willingness to accept novel income sources among the local populations are sufficient to permit such revenue to enact animal welfare and species conservation goals in areas adjacent to lion habitats.”
This work poses a serious problem for Van Der Merwe and Saayman. The communities they claim are helped by trophy hunting clearly do not want it.
Not comparing apples with apples
The reason that Van Der Merwe and Saayman have come up with such a large “economic impact” figure is because they combined the effects of domestic “biltong” hunting and international “trophy hunting” in their multiplier analysis (more on this dubious methodology later), which has not been done previously.
It would have been helpful to separate these two out, especially given that it is difficult to ascertain the number of “biltong” hunters, a problem the authors readily admit to: “Although care was taken to reach both segments of the hunting tourism industry, the estimate of the number of biltong hunters in South Africa remains only that.”
Read more: Trophy hunting in the greater Kruger area — what the study overlooks
On expenditure alone, much of which does not accrue directly to South Africa (plane tickets bought elsewhere, etc), the authors calculate that trophy hunting is worth $169.6-million (presumably per year), while biltong hunting is worth $718.7-million. As Steph Klarmann showed earlier this year, though, statistics obtained via the Promotion of Access to Information Act put the figure at $83-million (R1.47-billion) for trophy hunting in 2023 (which cost 34,515 animals their lives). This is nearly half the number reported by Van Der Merwe and Saayman.
Read more: Dead wild animals by numbers - Professional Hunters Association stats tell a grim tale
The last academic estimate on the economic significance (not just direct expenditure) of international trophy hunting to South Africa was made in 2018 by the same North-West authors. That paper is methodologically flawed to the same degree as the 2025 iteration, as I have explained at length in other work.
The 2018 paper boldly claimed that – including the multiplier effect – trophy hunting was worth $341-million to the South African economy (presumably in any given season). Without the multiplier effect, the authors estimate expenditure was worth about $250-million.
Journalists like Stoddard should therefore be more careful when stating that the 2025 work reflects a “significantly larger sum” than previous estimates. On trophy hunting alone, this is clearly untrue. Simply combining the two figures (biltong and trophy) and attaching a multiplier effect to them is dubious economics and not comparing apples with apples.
The 2025 Van der Merwe paper begins with a bit of history in the literature review about private wildlife ownership in South Africa and repeats a 2005 figure that about 20 million hectares of wild landscape is currently under private ownership in South Africa through roughly 9,000 “game” farms. By contrast, state land under conservation is eight million hectares, of which the Kruger National Park accounts for at least a quarter.
Erroneous assumptions
An underlying assumption that permeates much of the literature that Van Der Merwe and Saayman cite, and that they themselves seem to uncritically accept, is that this private wild land would automatically convert to nature-destructive agriculture if hunting were removed as a revenue option. This is an untested assumption, useful as a rhetorical device to rationalise hunting but useless as a means of ascertaining truth.
Moreover, these 9,000 farms are often internally fragmented and not joined up (except in the case of the Associated Private Nature Reserves on the western boundary of the Kruger Park, where the community surveys were run to show opposition to trophy hunting). They are, therefore, hardly an unmitigated good, and many have a poor record of managing elephants and lions. None of this is recognised by the authors.
Flawed methodology
The most concerning thing about the Van Der Merwe paper is the methodology:
- Self-reporting by hunters: First, the results are drawn from a “web-based, self-administered questionnaire” distributed by the Sustainable Use Coalition. This is a coalition of about 150,000 people committed to the idea that placing an extractive value on an animal is the only thing that should determine whether that animal is worth keeping or not. In other words, “if it pays, it stays”. A corollary problem is that those who complete the survey have a vested interest in the outcome – in other words, those who hunt have an interest in overstating their self-reported expenditure to maintain pro-hunting policies;
- Insufficient sample size: The sample size is extremely small. Only 414 hunters responded to the survey out of a possible 6,242 international hunters who came to South Africa between August 2022 and October 2023 (the period under consideration after Covid). That’s a paltry 6.6% of the total. The authors write that “the international questionnaire asked respondents to recall their spending during their last hunting safari to South Africa”. They did this on the assumption that most international hunters only visit South Africa once a year. Of course, what they’re asking for is self-reported thumb-sucking. There is literally no verification of the data or any attempt to ascertain whether what is reported is true;
- Wrong assumption that all hunters spend equally: After discounting for the fact that a portion of the expenditure does not accrue to South Africa, the authors estimated that each hunter in their sample spent an average of $27,170. They then simply multiplied that amount by 6,242, as if their 6.6% sample was somehow representative of the entire population. This is how they get the figure of $169.6-million; and
- Dubious multiplier: The authors use the latest Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) to calculate a “multiplier effect” of hunters’ expenditure. This is a table that estimates the induced and indirect impact on the economy of every dollar spent. Using an overall production multiplier of 2.97 across all sectors affected by hunting expenditure, they calculate that total spending of $856.6-million (trophy and biltong combined) equates to economic significance of $2.543-billion.
My problem with this kind of hit job is that it suffers from weak economics, which any peer reviewer should have picked up. The SAM is deficient when applied to ecologically and ethically contentious activities like trophy hunting because it depends on a mechanistic conception of the economy as a closed circular flow of income and fails to account for the real biophysical opportunity costs of depleting irreplaceable nature (especially of ecosystem engineers like elephants). It further treats all monetary transactions as equally virtuous, thereby granting the same economic “weight” to a trophy fee for killing a lion as to expenditures on education or ecosystem restoration. This reductionist metric ignores the sacrificed regenerative and intrinsic value of biodiversity.
Opportunity cost assumptions
The authors argue that $2.5-billion is the “loss to the economy should this activity totally cease to exist”. But that is sheer unwarranted speculation, along with the concluding claim that “reduction in hunting tourism activities will negatively impact land use for wildlife as landowners will revert back to alternative agricultural activities such as domesticated livestock or crop farming to generate revenue, which will not benefit wildlife and conservation”.
The authors have done no economics work to demonstrate this at all. All they have done is make a dubious claim that hunting is worth $2.5-billion to the South African economy. That does not give anyone licence to claim that removing hunting would render that land suddenly devoid of any biodiversity.
The bottom line is that the very communities that hunters say they benefit are the same communities telling us they don’t want it, and the figures to rationalise this extractive activity are clearly overblown. DM