The playgrounds of trigger-happy trophy hunters are far removed from the fertile fruit farms of the Western Cape and Eastern Cape. But a recent television expose of driven hunting has established a disturbing link between the agricultural and hunting sectors. The link is Anton de Vries – a Dutch businessman and fruit exporter whose companies SAFE & BONO are strategic partners in the government’s agrarian land reform policies.

De Vries owns or manages over 20 fruit, livestock and game farms in South Africa, including three in Alldays, Limpopo, where the driven hunt took place. Unlike traditional hunting, in which target animals have a reasonable chance of escape, all the shooters had to do was take pot shots at the traumatised targets who were chased into their sights.

Like canned lion hunting, in which the animals are caged and drugged, driven hunting is not illegal in South Africa. Unlike canned hunting however, this unethical sport has until now never been exposed in South Africa. It comes in the wake of the recent killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe and the release of Blood Lions – a documentary exposing the brutal underbelly of canned lion hunting.

The fact that De Vries has been implicated in this hunt adds further fuel to an ongoing investigation by the SABC into the Dutch businessman’s activities in allegedly swindling farmworkers and farming co-operatives out of their profits and thus depriving the rightful beneficiaries of the government’s land reform policies.

Through its BEE company, BONO, whose CEO is the politically connected Evans Nevondo, SAFE is mandated to provide infrastructural and economic empowerment on the farms it manages. On its website, BONO advertises its certification by Fairtrade, an international body that sets standards for exports, based on adequate labour and living conditions for farming communities.

But BONO was decertified in July 2015 for non-compliance.

The driven hunt in Limpopo was justified on the grounds that it gives work and food to impoverished rural communities where unemployment is rife and job opportunities scarce. In this hunt, occurring over five days, 83 ‘beaters’ were employed to chase antelope, baboons and warthogs toward the shooters. Over 100 animals were gunned down in what the NSPCA has condemned as a ‘massacre’. That’s not taking into account the scores of animals that were wounded in the process.

After De Vries was exposed on television for the driven hunt in Limpopo, the SAFE and BONO website was shut down.

At the time, neither De Vries nor Nevondo were available for comment. But shortly after their activities were exposed on SABC News, their PR firm made contact, requesting that their clients be given the right of reply to the serious allegations leveled against them.

SABC will afford them the opportunity to defend themselves.

The full version of this investigation will be broadcast on Special Assignment, Sunday 4th October at 8.30pm on SABC3.

Travel conference organizers have decided not to screen a documentary that raises critical questions about key tourist attractions their event promotes

Travel conference organizers have decided not to screen a documentary that raises critical questions about key tourist attractions their event promotes.

Local delegates to the World Youth and Student Travel Conference (WYSTC) 2015 asked the hosts to include a screening of the film ‘Blood Lions’ in their programme. The documentary shows young, conservation-minded volunteers from around the world paying thousands of rands to work at South African facilities that offer tourists the opportunity to pet lion cubs and go for bush walks with juvenile lions.

What most of the volunteers don’t know is that the majority of the lions they help to raise are destined for the bullets of wealthy trophy hunters.

“Wildlife volunteering in Africa is huge. Kids from all over the world want to come here to help animals,” says ‘Blood Lions’ director Bruce Young. ”The organisers of the conference are key players in this whole industry and given its location, timing and content you would have thought that sharing ‘Blood Lions’ with delegates would be a valuable exercise. We’re not trying to discourage volunteering, but we do want youngsters who end up at lion breeding facilities to ask themselves some crucial questions: where do all of these cubs come from and where do they end up?”

According to Wendy Morrill, one of the conference organisers, “several discussions were had regarding if and how to share relevant content from the film with WYSTC 2015 delegates. Unfortunately the involved parties were not able to come to terms of mutual agreement”.

“We are, however, running a session on lion programmes and volunteer organisations for registered delegates”. This workshop will be hosted by Dr Jackie Abell of the African Lion Environmental and Research Trust (ALERT), which claims to focus on lion conservation through research, education and responsible development. It promotes operations that allow tourists to walk with lions in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and bases much of its work on the suggestion that captive-bred lions can be successfully re-introduced into the wild.

South African conservationist Ian Michler, who is the central character in ‘Blood Lions’, has criticised ALERT for attempting to “legitimise their lion captive-breeding programmes and money-spinning tourist operations” “under the banner of conservation, science or education”, while a group of researchers who examined ALERT’s assertions found that “the lion encounter industry relies on animals so habituated to human presence that they can never be released”, that “untrained volunteers are placed in extraordinarily dangerous situations that have resulted in attacks, including fatalities”, and that “captive-origin lions have no role in species restoration”.

One of the sponsors of WYSTC 2015 is African Impact, “a Cape Town based volunteer experience organisation” which “helped establish” and has a “strong partnership” with ALERT.

Conference delegates have been invited to an unofficial, free screening of ‘Blood Lions’ on Tuesday 22 September at 5:30pm at the Cullinan Hotel, across the road from the conference venue.

Ahead of the World Youth and Student Travel Conference (WYSTC) to be held in Cape Town next week, Fair Trade Tourism today announced that it is collaborating with global and local NGOs to develop additional certification criteria that will address the potential exploitation of children and captive-held wildlife within the volunteerism sector.

Fair Trade Tourism is the first certification scheme to develop specific criteria for the multi-billion dollar global volunteerism industry. The social and economic contribution of volunteers in developing countries is potentially huge, yet there is little oversight of this burgeoning industry, which largely targets the youth.

A recent Human Sciences Research Council report warns of voluntourists crowding out local workers and of unstable attachments and losses experienced by children who bond with short-term, foreign caregivers. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, in some African countries the rise in volunteerism is associated with a boom in unregistered orphanages where children’s welfare is secondary to profits. Leading environmental NPO, Wildlands, has warned of the proliferation of captive lion breeding outfits where volunteers sign up to hand-rear cubs that have been forcibly removed from their mothers and are destined to be sold for canned lion hunting.

In 2009, Fair Trade Tourism played a pioneering role by developing certification criteria for voluntourism, focusing on the involvement of local communities, the fair share of benefits, adequate screening and training of volunteers, and preventing child labour. By end 2015, it will develop additional criteria to specifically protect volunteers, as well as children and wildlife involved in volunteer programmes, from exploitation or abuse.

Fair Trade Tourism Managing Director Nivashnee Naidoo said responsible voluntourism players wanted to differentiate themselves by adopting best-practice standards that avoided the exploitation of local communities, wildlife or the volunteers themselves. “We believe we have a leading role to play in setting the best-practice benchmark”.

Non-executive director Jane Edge said Fair Trade Tourism was consulting with a range of concerned NGOs, including Tourism Watch, Akte, ECPAT, Wildlands and Endangered Wildlife Trust. “Our new criteria will focus more carefully on the way volunteer programmes market themselves, whether programmes are responsible and sustainable, and how carefully volunteers are prepared. With programmes involving children, such as orphanage or school placements, we will look at issues around child protection and well-being, including the risk of bonding abnormalities and of sexual exploitation.

“With captive wildlife programmes, we will look at issues around the well-being of animals, the level of human-animal interaction, potential dangers to volunteers, and the verification of conservation claims made.”

Dr Andrew Venter, CEO of Wildlands, said: “There is a cynical relationship between programmes that offer cub petting and walking with young lions and their eventual demise in canned lion hunts.” Kelly Marnewick, carnivore conservation manager for the Endangered Wildlife Trust, said the containment and breeding of lions was usually done under the banner of conservation, “but the bottom line is that the lion encounter industry does nothing to conserve wild lions”.

Fair Trade Tourism Programme Development Manuel Bollmann said while European Governments support the volunteer services of young adults in developing countries, this support is linked to obligations, with increasing pressure for volunteer organisations to subject themselves to due diligence and for volunteers to attend comprehensive preparation programmes. “Fair Trade Tourism certified organisations will receive increasing market support in future as the need to differentiate the credible players grows.”

Fair Trade Tourism plans to release its revised certification criteria by December 2015 following a period of consultation with relevant NGOs and the volunteer tourism sector.