Shadows within shadows: the environmental injustices of Botswana’s red zone
By Wisse van Engelen and Pierre du Plessis
Rewilding is an increasingly popular nature conservation strategy in Europe and beyond. Focusing on natural processes rather than species composition, it aims to stimulate ecosystem integrity by letting nature go its own way in previously human-dominated areas. In Europe, the rewilding movement primarily targets former agricultural areas that are increasingly abandoned as people move to urban centres (Navarro & Pereira, 2012). Rewilders consider this rural exodus to be an opportunity for nature, but it also raises questions about the wider implications. Without coupling such land use changes to a decrease in food consumption, food production is largely outsourced and has consequences elsewhere in the world. For Europe, this has meant shifting a significant amount of its food production to the Global South, often with detrimental environmental effects in those spaces (Swanson, 2015). Political scientist Peter Dauvergne (1997) describes these long-distance environmental effects of natural resource consumption that emerge with supply chains as producing “shadow ecologies.” In this sense, while Europe seeks to revitalize its own environments, it can be seen as simultaneously displacing the environmental effects of its food consumption, producing shadow ecologies elsewhere in the world, mostly in the Global South (see also Balmford et al., 2025).
What happens in these places in the Global South that support the appetites, economies, and ecologies of the Global North? Ecofeminist and environmental philosopher Val Plumwood argues, similarly, that they are enacted as “shadow places” that provide “material and ecological support, most of which, in a global market, are likely to elude our knowledge and responsibility” (Plumwood, 2008: 139). While local environmental action is important, she argues that such action cannot overlook the fact that we live in a globally connected world; we also need to understand how our actions impact different places in the world and take responsibility and accountability for these impacts. More than simply diagnosing the production of shadow places, Plumwood calls for accountability across those distance spanning geographies. It is in this spirit, as Europe aims to restore and rewild areas long dominated by industrial and agricultural production, that it is all the more important to attend, and be responsive, to potential shadow effects so as to avoid undermining the planetary scale of the environmental crisis. Displacing production to regions in the Global South where wildlife and their environments have not yet been lost to these production processes not only risks exacerbating the crisis, but global inequity across the Global North-South divide.
In his current research project, Pierre du Plessis studies Botswana as one such shadow ecology. Botswana has exported beef to Europe since colonial times: at first to meet the demands of the British and, after independence, as a central component of the postcolonial state’s rapid economic development, which primarily benefited the cattle owning elite. Today, thousands of tonnes of beef from Botswana still enter Europe every year as a result of an economic partnership agreement. The effects of this export-oriented cattle industry have been significant for the ecologies and communities of Botswana. The Kalahari Desert in Botswana was once a place where San hunter-gatherers and abundant wildlife lived and roamed but has been increasingly taken over by cattle that deplete the groundwater and overgraze the vegetation. Roughly half a million wildebeest are thought to have moved through the Kalahari in the 1950s. Their seasonal movements were one of the largest in the world in terms of biomass, but these movements have now been largely halted by a number of obstacles, primarily related to the cattle industry. These obstacles include fenced cattle ranches and roads, but perhaps most significant are the many veterinary fences that carve up the spatial ecology of Botswana. One fence in particular, the Kuke Veterinary Cordon Fence, has had especially devastating effects on wildlife (Owens and Owens, 1984). Slicing nearly 300 kilometres across Botswana, it separates the dry Kalahari grasslands in the south from the wetlands in the north, disrupting wildlife migratory routes. When several prolonged periods of drought hit the region in the decades following its construction in 1958, hundreds of thousands of wildebeest perished at the fence, unable to reach water and grazing resources. In a relatively short period of time, wildebeest populations in Botswana plummeted from “well over of a third of a million in 1979 to a little over 32000 in 1990” (Spinage, 2024: 81).
However, these negative effects of the cattle export industry remain largely overlooked by European authorities and citizens who view the economic partnership agreement with Botswana as a form of aid that supports economic development and that spurs the modernization of veterinary medicine. In Europe, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has been eradicated and beef is not allowed to enter its market when it comes from countries or zones that are not free from FMD. While FMD is not considered a problem for the cattle in Botswana (the disease is mild in nature), it is considered a problem for their meat destined for Europe. To address this problem Europe requires biosecurity measures in Botswana, including the building of veterinary fences, and offers support through developing global policy frameworks and strategies. This shifts border control outward and constitutes an extension of sovereign power which Bruce Braun (2007) calls ‘extraterritorial’ (see also Dijstelbloem, 2020). As a form of enlightened self-interest, the biosecurity measures are supposed to benefit not only Europe in its fight against FMD, but Botswana too (as it is assumed to similarly want to control FMD).
But looking at what the biosecurity measures actually entail and bring about, we can question whether most Batswana indeed stand to benefit. While cattle and beef export remain important features of the cultural and economic landscape of postcolonial Botswana, including for rural communities, it increasingly benefits the wealthy, widening the gap between rich and poor. As recent studies suggest, the beef export industry primarily benefits a relatively small group of elite cattle owning actors able to adhere to stringent regulations imposed by Europe via the World Animal Health Organization (Bennett and Rich, 2019). Meanwhile, wildlife and San people pay the price of this international trade and a large part of the country is cast into the shadows.
This disparity in who benefits and who loses within Botswana indicates that ecological shadow relations do not just play out along national lines; we also find disparate, heterogenous, and unevenly distributed effects within countries. In Botswana, these shadow relations unfold differently in different regions organized around particular biosecurity designations that address veterinary diseases. The clearest example of this can be found in the northern part of the country where Wisse van Engelen’s research explores how FMD control has taken shape with manifold effects on wildlife and rural communities. This is because the north – with its national parks and game reserves, part of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area – is not only home to cattle but also African buffalo: a confirmed reservoir host for FMD. Areas where these bovines roam cannot be recognized as FMD-free (even if the virus is only present in buffalo and not in cattle) and are therefore excluded, in principle, from the European beef export market. Whole countries may be prevented from exporting because of the buffalo presence, but in the 1990’s international disease control policy has made provision for the creation of distinct FMD zones to facilitate beef trade even if countries are not disease-free as a whole. Botswana, therefore, has split the country into two zones: the north an FMD vaccination zone and the south an FMD free zone – also known as, respectively, the red and green zone (see below map).
In the green zone, cattle are internationally recognized as being FMD-free and farmers are able to export their beef to Europe if they adhere to the necessary traceability protocols. In the red zone, however, cattle are entirely precluded from the European export market. Located between the green zone and the national parks where the buffalo roam, the red zone is thought to act as a buffer for the green zone; a first line of defence against possible outbreaks originating from buffalo. Splitting up the country into these zones thus means that disease control efforts are further externalized and concentrated, shifting their impacts away from the places they protect (Mather & Marshall, 2011). And unlike the country-wide disease control measures, the zonal approach does not come with an expansion of market access for those who are subjected to these efforts. On the contrary, the establishment of the red zone more or less fixes the disease status of the region and thereby makes export to Europe and other green zones impossible even in the long-term absence of an outbreak.
As such, the communal and agricultural areas of the red zone do not just function as an unaffected buffer between the buffalo areas and the green zone; they also have to pay the costs of disease control. The red zone has veterinary fences both around and within it, and these fences cut up landscapes, restricting access to resources for people and animals alike (Darkoh & Mbaiwa, 2009; Mbaiwa & Mbaiwa, 2006). Moreover, when an outbreak occurs, control measures do not allow cattle to be moved between subzones and the abattoir is closed. Even exporting to other red zones becomes impossible, leaving farmers without an opportunity to sell their cattle, thereby failing to meet the demands of the cash-based economy. These situations can last for months or even years on end, causing considerable hardships on the north’s rural populations (Atkinson et al., 2019).
These costs are however rarely considered in the south of the country (let alone in Europe). Ignorant of the ecologies that support them, Europe and Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, enact shadow relations that constitute environmental injustices. First, European import and consumption of Botswana beef influences the ordering of space in the Southern African country that has led to wildlife die-off and the production of a “shadow ecology”. But second – within the shadows of Botswana – Gaborone and the green zone cast a shadow upon the red zone, impeding not only wildlife ecologies but also the local cash economy and rural livelihoods, revealing multiple layers of shadows, or shadows within shadows.
Bringing the red zone out of the shadows requires tracing the series of interwoven and cascading sets of relations that, by extension, connect back to rewilding efforts in Europe. As Heather Swanson (2015) has argued, the production of shadow ecologies do not just affect the peripheries from where resources are extracted, but also reverberate back to affect the landscape ecologies in centres of consumption. In this sense, rewilding of European landscapes can be seen as made possible, in part, by outsourcing food production. As important as environmental restoration in Europe is, these efforts cannot come at the expense of wildlife environments and rural economies in the Global South. Doing so only displaces the environmental harm of European consumption and further entrenches global inequity. Rendering these relations visible is crucial at a time of planetary environmental crisis, and – as such – writing about them hopefully contributes (in some small way) to achieving environmental and social justice.
References
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