The Benefits of Mountain Gorilla Tourism

From the start of gorilla tourism, everyone has been worried about its potential drawbacks, such as disturbance, increased susceptibility of habituated gorillas to hunting, and of course, transmission of disease from humans to gorillas. Indeed, right at the start of the Mountain Gorilla Project in the Volcano National Park, Rwanda, the then Director of the Office of National Parks, Dismas Nsabimana, said that the Office's opinion was that it did not want tourism developed, because the park should be sacrosanct, existing for its animals and plants only, uninvaded by humans. The huge problem was that the park was already invaded then by humans, and their cattle, thousands of them. On balance, the Director quickly decided that well-regulated tourism was the lesser evil, both because it involved so much less invasion of the park, and because the revenue generated could massively improve other aspects of park management. In other words, costs have to be balanced against benefits. Yes, of course, there are potential dangers from tourism, but let's look at some data on the balance of benefits and costs.
1. Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda, 1978 - no tourism. Thousands of cattle, and hundreds of people, poor people heavily infected by parasites and disease because they are poor, far more heavily infected than any tourist, wandered unhindered through the park, defecating, destroying at will. Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda, 1988 - a well-developed tourism program in place. No cattle were in the park; poaching of gorillas was almost non-existent; a revenue from tourism of hundreds of thousands of dollars was being used to run and equip a trained guard force; the gorilla population was increasing; and the country was so proud of its gorillas and the foreign attention to them and their park that the gorilla was on the country's bank notes, and its natural history was being taught in the country's schoolrooms as a means to encourage conservation of the country's natural wealth.
2. Rwanda began to increase protection and management of its sector of the Virunga Conservation Area from 1976, with removal of all cattle from the park. Protection increased hugely in 1979 with the implementation of Rwanda's Mountain Gorilla Project of managed tourism, along with improved funding and training for guards, and a conservation education program. Zaire and Uganda did not change policies at this time. We thus have an easy separation of the conservation area, and of gorilla groups, into protected and unprotected, into areas and groups heavily but illegally visited, and areas and groups far less heavily, and legally, visited. Unprotected region - 70% of sampled quadrats contain snares in 1981; protected - 30% contain snares. Unprotected groups - 22% decline in number of immature animals between 1973 and 1981; protected - 17% increase. Unprotected - immatures are 30% of population, below calculated replacement levels; protected - immatures are 39% of the population, at replacement levels. These are statistically significant differences. Most importantly in the present context, among the protected gorilla groups, those groups visited by tourists had more infants per female than those visited by researchers. Sample size was not great enough for statistical tests, but all research and tourist groups were counted.
3. Rwanda's Virunga Volcano region can, it has been demonstrated, return a large profit from agriculture, certainly a larger profit than from the trickle of tourists that were using the area in the late 1970s. However, by the late 1980s, tourism had in economic terms overtaken agriculture. When that happened, the danger of the conversion of the Parc National des Volcans to agriculture receded, especially in light of the favorable international publicity engendered by Rwanda's tourism program, and the increased protection it allowed.
Without tourism, the Virungas' gorillas would, I think, be in a far worse state today than they are now. Tourism itself, and especially the increased protection that its revenues allow, seem, on balance, to have been and to be a benefit to Rwanda's gorillas. Let's be aware of the dangers of disease transmission, and of the other drawbacks of tourism. But let's cope with them, let's not let fear of tourism's disadvantages prevent parks and the gorillas in them benefitting from a well-run tourism program.

Alexander Harcourt

Prof. Alexander H. Harcourt, now at the Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, was born in Kenya, and began a lifetime of studying gorillas in Africa in 1971, in Rwanda and Zaire. He has studied them in Nigeria and Uganda too, and continues to write about their behaviour, ecology and conservation.

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