In South Africa, in April 2024, the government announced an unprecedented measure: the gradual closure of the industry of breeding lions in captivity for trophy hunting. According to the ministerial report published a few months earlier, the country was then home to 348 breeding farms holding roughly 7,838 lions — nearly all of them destined to be killed by foreign hunters, or to provide bones for traditional Asian medicine.

The decision drew little attention outside Africa. Yet it reveals the hidden face of an industry that, at the continental scale, is worth more than $12 billion a year — the private safari business, presented as a driver of responsible tourism, conservation funding and local employment. The reality documented by government reports, international investigations and NGOs is more nuanced: open greenwashing, industrial breeding masked behind conservation rhetoric, financial structures routed through tax havens, displacement of indigenous populations. This article reviews what the sources allow us to establish, and what they leave in the dark.

To understand what is at stake, two ideas must be held together. On one hand, the safari, as a tourist activity, is a real economic pillar in several African countries: it employs hundreds of thousands of people, generates substantial tax revenue, and funds — when the money stays on the ground — effective conservation schemes. On the other hand, a substantial part of the sector operates on models that mix classic wildlife tourism, trophy hunting, extraterritorial value capture, and land-use conflicts with local populations.

The line between the two runs through specific mechanisms, framed by national legislations that vary widely from one country to another. This article describes these mechanisms.

Safari tourism, a fragile economic pillar

African wildlife tourism is no marginal pastime. According to estimates from several sector sources, safaris generated more than $12 billion in annual revenue in Africa before the pandemic, on a continental tourism market of around $39 billion. The distribution is uneven: the main beneficiaries are Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Uganda and Rwanda.

Associated employment is massive. In Kenya, tourism accounted before Covid for more than 8% of total employment, with about 1.1 million jobs linked to the sector, according to figures consolidated by the international press. In Tanzania, the number of jobs linked to safari is estimated in the hundreds of thousands. In South Africa, the travel and tourism industry — of which safari is one of the pillars — employs around 600,000 people, according to sector estimates cited at the time of the pandemic.

These orders of magnitude explain Covid's devastating effect. In 2020, international tourism to Africa fell by 93%, according to figures compiled by international organisations. Tens of thousands of sector workers — guides, cooks, drivers, reserve rangers, hotel staff — lost their incomes. In Kenya, reports documented families that depended on these wages and that fell within weeks into the survival economy: small trading, informal loans, return to the countryside.

This dependence has become, in itself, a political argument used by operators: "without us, the local economy collapses". The argument is partly true. It is also used to neutralise criticism of the sector's abuses.

The lion-breeding industry, the long shadow of the "safari"

The most emblematic case of what is referred to here, in shorthand, as the "hidden face" of private safaris is that of the South African industry of breeding lions in captivity. The mechanism, documented for more than ten years by NGOs such as Blood Lions, World Animal Protection and Born Free, works as follows: animals are bred in captivity from birth, in specialised farms; they are sometimes used for the tourist industry (cub-petting sessions with cubs, fake sanctuary volunteering); then, as adults, they are sold to hunting operators who release them into more or less large enclosures, where they are shot by foreign hunters — a practice called "canned hunting". Their bones then feed an export market to Asia, where they serve as a substitute for tiger in some traditional preparations.

The scale of this industry has long been underestimated. The South African ministerial report of February 2024, known as the MTT report (Ministerial Task Team), documented the full inventory for the first time:

  • 348 lion-breeding farms in operation in South Africa;
  • around 7,838 lions held in captivity in these structures;
  • an economy that depended massively on trophy hunting, financed essentially by foreign clients (Americans, Eastern Europeans, some Western Europeans);
  • a parallel lion bone export market, whose legal status changed several times over the 2010s.

The contrast with wild populations is documented. South Africa holds around 3,500 lions in the wild, less than half the number held in captivity. At the continental scale, total wild African lion populations are estimated at 20,000 to 25,000 individuals, according to conservation organisations.

It is in this context that Barbara Creecy, then South Africa's Environment Minister, announced on 3 April 2024, at a press conference in Cape Town, the Cabinet's decision to end commercial lion breeding in the country. The declaration drew on the recommendations of the MTT report and confirmed an orientation already announced in 2021. Breeders are now given a two-year period to voluntarily cease their activity and reconvert their business model, before the ban formally takes effect.

The scope of the announcement remained cautious. No complete legal framework yet exists: it is a government policy (Policy Position) approved by the Cabinet, which must then be translated into law. And reports published in August 2024, on the occasion of World Lion Day, documented that some farms continue their activities in contravention of national and international rules — proof that the transition will take time.

A safari 4x4 with a pop-up roof drives through long grass at sunset on the African savannah.

Documented "greenwashing"

Beyond the specific case of lion breeding, it is the general rhetoric of the "sustainable safari" that has come under converging criticism.

The term covers a wide range of very different practices: trips to community reserves where revenues genuinely return to local populations; stays in lodges that fund conservation programmes; but also purely commercial operations that simply employ local staff and install a few solar panels to claim an "eco-responsible" label.

Dr Jennifer Lalley, co-founder of the tour operator Natural Selection — herself active in the sustainable segment — has, on several public occasions, warned of the gap between marketing and reality:

Several characteristic markers of greenwashing in the sector have been identified by specialised investigations:

  • Self-awarded labels: many operators claim "sustainable" certifications that they self-attribute or that are issued by bodies they themselves fund.
  • Symbolic local benefits: recruitment of staff from neighbouring communities, without real transfer of ownership or redistribution of margins.
  • Protected surface area highlighted, without precision on management mode or on the share of revenues reinvested in conservation.
  • Lack of accounting transparency: few operators publish the breakdown of their financial flows, their local revenues versus their margins repatriated abroad.
  • Coupling of hunting and tourism: some structures combine wildlife tourism activities (photography, observation) and trophy hunting, without mentioning it in their consumer-facing communications.

What strikes observers is less the existence of greenwashing — which affects every "green" tourism sector — than its sophistication in the safari industry: it is often carried by operators themselves based in Europe or North America, who master the codes of Western environmental discourse.

The money of safari: tax havens in the circuit

The other structural dimension of criticism of the sector concerns its extraterritorial financialisation.

The Out of Africa, Into Tax Havens investigation published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) documented, from accounting leaks, the mechanisms by which some African tour operators route their bookings and financial flows through low-tax jurisdictions — British Virgin Islands, Mauritius, certain Bahamas structures — before redistributing a reduced fraction of the revenues to African operating countries.

The mechanism, in itself, is not illegal. It does, however, raise a problem of value capture: the countries that physically host the safaris — Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Botswana — see part of the sector's revenues escape them before they can even be taxed. And the local communities that bear the direct consequences (footfall, pressure on resources, restrictions on land use) recover an even smaller fraction.

This issue of fiscal localisation has become a topic of debate in several African countries. Kenya, in particular, has tried in recent years to strengthen the fiscal declaration obligations of operators, with no great apparent success. Tanzania has put in place specific taxes on nights in private lodges. But the asymmetry between the agility of international operators and the administrative capacity of states remains structural.

The Kenyan model: hunting banned since 1977

Not all African countries have the same relationship to safari. Kenya made, as early as the 1970s, the opposite choice to that of several neighbours: it banned sport hunting in 1977, through the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act. The decision, taken under President Jomo Kenyatta, was motivated by the spectacular collapse of animal populations: a decade of intensive hunting exploitation had wiped out half of certain emblematic species.

Kenya has therefore, for forty-eight years, bet on non-lethal wildlife tourism: observation, photography, lodge stays. This bet paid off economically for a long time — the country attracted, before the pandemic, more than a million foreign visitors a year, mainly drawn by wildlife. "Photographic" tourism contributed to more than 10% of national GDP, according to common estimates.

The Kenyan ban has been regularly attacked by hunting lobbies, which highlight the subsequent declines of some wild populations — particularly in the unprotected areas of the country's north, where tourism does not generate enough revenue to offset human pressure. The argument is used to claim that "regulated hunting would be a better conservation tool than prohibition". The technical debate divides conservationists.

But the position of the Kenyan government has not shifted. In 2024, the Ministry of Environment and the Kenya Wildlife Service publicly reaffirmed the ban on trophy hunting, in response to proposals for a partial lifting. The country continues to appear, on the continental map of the sector, as a structuring exception: intensive wildlife tourism, trophy hunting prohibited.

The cost for local communities

The last dimension — often the least covered — concerns the social impact of large private safari schemes on populations who live nearby or in areas converted into reserves.

The model of "fortress conservation", inherited from the colonial era and adapted to the contemporary period, often rests on the creation of guarded parks, where access is regulated to preserve wildlife. This setup has a documented cost: in several cases, it has led to forced displacements of indigenous populations — Maasai in Tanzania around Loliondo and Ngorongoro, Bushmen in Botswana around the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Batwa in several countries of Central and East Africa.

The term used by indigenous rights NGOs is that of "conservation refugees": people displaced not by a war or by an industrial project, but by the creation of protected areas where access is suddenly restricted, on territories where they had sometimes lived for several generations.

The debate is complex. Conservation has a real ecological meaning, and some areas must be protected from human pressure to avoid the collapse of animal populations. But the dominant model — where the economic beneficiaries (Western tourists, international operators, national governments) are structurally distinct from the populations that bear the costs (displaced families, land-use restrictions, human-wildlife conflict) — has been the subject of increasingly precise academic and activist criticism over the 2010s and 2020s.

Several countries are now experimenting with community models: conservation zones where local populations remain landowners, receive a share of tourism revenues, and participate in the governance of the schemes. Botswana, Namibia and certain regions of Kenya have launched such experiments. Assessments are mixed, but they open an alternative to the classic model.

And the climate?

A final, more global dimension is not specific to safaris but concerns them directly: the carbon footprint of long-haul international tourism. The tourism sector accounts for about 8% of global CO₂ emissions, and safari is, by its very nature, an activity that involves long flights from Europe or the Americas.

The argument is often dodged in the "sustainable safari" discourse — which focuses on sustainability on the ground (solar energy in lodges, recycling, local recruitment) without addressing the question of the air transport that is its economic precondition. It is one of the segment's structural contradictions: a fifteen-day "low-carbon" trip, the very access to which requires an intercontinental return flight that represents most of the total footprint.

The topic comes back regularly in the reports of organisations such as the World Tourism Organization or the World Economic Forum, without an operational answer having emerged. The sector, by construction, is not in a position to resolve this contradiction without giving up a substantial part of its clientele.

What the South African decision changes — and what it doesn't

The April 2024 announcement marks, on the sector's map, a real turning point. It is the first time that a major safari country has acknowledged the exit from a mass breeding industry of an iconic species. It enshrines in public policy what NGOs had been demanding for fifteen years. It aligns South Africa with Kenya — at least on the question of captive lions.

But it does not change the global model. Safari revenues remain mostly captured abroad; financial flows continue to pass, for a significant part, through extraterritorial jurisdictions; greenwashing remains, at the continental scale, a structural risk to the sector's credibility; and indigenous populations displaced by the expansion of protected areas are still waiting, in most cases, for effective recognition and reparation.

The debate on what a truly "ethical" safari should be is, fundamentally, a debate on what tourism should be in the age of climate change and global inequalities. Should long-haul stays continue to be promoted as the main vehicle for conservation funding? Should this funding be redirected, on the contrary, towards public or philanthropic mechanisms less dependent on tourism? Should community models be prioritised where the traveller is no longer a consumer but a guest? No consensus emerges.

On the ground, another, more down-to-earth question mobilises operators and authorities. How to make tourism supply chains traceable — who really controls each lodge, where revenues actually go, which animals are hunted or observed in which areas — without suffocating a sector on which hundreds of thousands of local jobs depend? The answer will not be found by a single actor. It supposes an articulation between national regulation (such as South Africa's on lions), operator commitment (transparency of flows and credible certifications), media and NGO vigilance, and information for travellers themselves.

It is this last dimension that justifies talking about it, simply. An informed traveller can, by choosing their tour operator, their lodge, their type of stay, weigh marginally on what becomes of the sector. Individual power is weak. Taken together, on the scale of a twelve-billion-dollar market a year, it is real.

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