USAID Demise Wrecks Conservation Efforts

The Trump government's broad-brush dismantlining of US-funded initiatives overseas has been devastating for many of the conservation efforts which hunters and hunting advocates have long championed.

Many long-term recovery projects in Africa, like the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, have been supported by funding from USAID for over two decades and have demonstrated tangible benefits, often restoring once barren areas into functioning wildlife habitats.

With USAID slashed without any apparent consultation or risk-assessment taking place, multiple such initiatives have been unceremoniously defunded. To date, around 12% of the funding for current conservation inititiatives around the world have been US funded. That is a proud legacy, supported in the past by Republican and Democrat administrations. Under Trump, it has come to an abrupt end.

Regardless of political allegiances, those of us involved with hunting around the world must, and do, recognise the vital work of these agencies, be they protecting the Galapagos islands from illegal fishing or searching the African bush for rhino poaching gangs.

The Trump cuts to USAID have halted much of this vital work and we face an epidemic of wildlife crime as staff are laid-off and operations are impacted. The demand from China and Vietnam in particular for tiger parts, or lion and jaguar as substitutes, to use in spurious oriental medicine products remains rapacious and criminal gangs operate on every continent to supply dealers, at the expense of the natural resources which are so valuable to us all.

African and Asian elephant ivory is poached, and the demand for rhino horn remains a constant danger, with violent poaching gangs seeking the huge rewards a successful poaching operation can deliver. They have driven rhino to the point of extinction in the wild in many areas and only well-funded anti-poaching and breeding programmes have stemmed the decline at all. That all now looks to be in danger of a reversal.

The US has formerly enjooyed a good reputation for the work done by USAID in the area of conservation. Between 2015 and 2024 funding averaged $740 million per annum in direct asistance, thereby achieveing real change and projecting soft power extremely effectively. In 2023 alone, USAID spent $350 million on conservation efforts around the world. That now all looks under threat. The future for these programmes and the flora and fauna they protect, is likely tio be one of more destruction, over-exploitation and even extinction.

The Trump administration is not without its hunting and conservation advocates. Both Trump's sons hunt and Don Jr, who recently visited London gunmakers and the Proof House is involved with Field Ethos magazine, which caters to hunters and promotes conservation.

If we, as a hunting community, are to be consistent in our messaging, we need to oppose these drastic cuts to vital progremmes. Perhaps Don Jr. might exert some influence here and awaken his father to the conservation imperative, even outside the US.

The America First movement is fundamentaliy isolationist and reductive but the need to protect habitats and environments around the globe is just one example of how important an international outlook is, even to the most insular of administrations. If Aerican hunters and tourists want to travel to the wilder places on earth and find in-tact native habitats full of game and rare species, and to continue that access for future generations, amore outward looking and sophisticated policy is required.

It is not too late and we would urge all right-minded supporters of the current administration to lobby thier representatives at every level and push for a reversal of this damaging and short-sighted abandonment of successful and important conservation, anti-poaching and criminal gang exposing initiatives around the world.