The French Prime Minister’s Ban on the Import of Hunting Trophies
Dear Mr. President
I am writing to you on behalf of the Sustainable Use Coalition of Southern Africa (SUCo-SA).
SUCo-SA represents a wide spectrum of organisations and individuals committed to the sustainable use of natural resources across Southern Africa. Our members include landowners, wildlife custodians, rural communities, and businesses involved in conservation-driven industries. Collectively, we manage vast areas of land, contribute significantly to conservation efforts, and provide substantial economic benefits to rural economies. The sustainable use model has proven essential in safeguarding biodiversity while delivering meaningful socio-economic outcomes for millions of people living in wildlife areas.
SUCo-SA’s influence on land management, economic contribution and conservation outcomes far exceeds that of organisations raising concerns without practical involvement in these landscapes.
It is therefore with considerable surprise and profound concern that we have learned of France’s decision, announced on 31 July 2026 by your Minister Delegate for Ecological Transition to introduce a total ban on the import of hunting trophies from threatened species and to suspend consideration of import-permit applications. Significantly, the Minister stated that this action was being taken at the request of the French Prime Minister.
Our surprise is not simply because France has chosen to adopt a stricter domestic measure. It is because this decision appears profoundly inconsistent with the principles of science-based conservation, sustainable use and international cooperation that France has itself endorsed.
France is a CITES Party, and CITES already has a system for this
France is a Party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). CITES was specifically created to ensure that international trade in wildlife does not threaten the survival of species.
The system is not based upon whether a particular activity is emotionally appealing or politically popular. It is based upon scientific assessment.
For CITES-listed hunting trophies, an exporting country’s Scientific Authority must determine that the proposed export is not detrimental to the survival of the species, the Non-Detriment Finding, or NDF, before the Management Authority can issue the appropriate export documentation. The Management Authority must also be satisfied that the specimen was legally acquired.
This is precisely the safeguard that France now appears to be bypassing.
CITES itself has expressly recognised that well-managed trophy hunting can be compatible with, and contribute to, species conservation, including by providing benefits to rural communities, creating incentives to conserve habitat and generating revenues that can be invested in conservation. Indeed, this was reiterated in the French Government’s own response to the French Senate earlier this year.
The question therefore has to be asked:
If the exporting country’s scientific authority has determined that a particular, regulated off-take is not detrimental to the survival of the species, on what scientific basis should France arbitrarily declare that it is?
If France believes that a particular country’s NDF is scientifically deficient, then surely the appropriate response is to engage with that country’s Scientific and Management Authorities through the CITES framework, not to replace international, science-based governance with a blanket political prohibition.
CITES itself has recently highlighted the need for stronger scientific consistency in NDFs and closer dialogue between importing and exporting countries.
There is an uncomfortable inconsistency here
France permits hunting within its own borders. Hunting is an established and deeply rooted component of French rural culture and land management, and successive French governments have recognised the role of hunters in managing wildlife and rural landscapes.
Indeed, Mr President, you yourself have repeatedly demonstrated an understanding of hunting’s place in French rural life and its potential contribution to biodiversity. In 2017, you described hunting as having a role in biodiversity preservation, and you have consistently defended the place of hunting and hunters in French rural society.
The French Prime Minister has likewise long been associated with France’s hunting and rural constituencies and has defended sustainable hunting and traditional hunting practices.
The Ministry for Ecological Transition, Biodiversity and International Negotiations on Climate and Nature itself has a dedicated adviser responsible for hunting, captive wild species, biomass and forestry economic sectors.
This makes the decision all the more difficult to understand.
Why is a regulated hunt in France regarded as a legitimate activity capable of contributing to wildlife management, while a regulated hunt in Africa, conducted under the laws of a sovereign African nation and subject to CITES controls, is suddenly characterised as something from which France must protect the world?
French hunters are permitted to hunt wildlife. International hunters travel to France and spend money in French rural communities to do so. Yet France now proposes to deny African countries the ability to derive comparable economic value from wildlife that they must conserve, while simultaneously asking those countries to bear the enormous costs of living with dangerous and destructive wildlife. That is not an equitable conservation partnership.
Who actually benefits from this ban?
During our research into the French decision, we asked a very simple question:
Who benefits?
The answer is deeply troubling.
We can identify a number of French-based political and animal-rights organisations that clearly benefit from the policy victory. The campaign was coordinated by Humane World for Animals Europe and Convergence Animaux Politique (CAP), with support from the Born Free Foundation, Brigitte Bardot Foundation, FOUR PAWS, Jane Goodall Institute France, The Animal Law, Ethics and Science Foundation and 30 Millions d’Amis.
The Jane Goodall Institute France itself describes the campaign as more than three years of coordinated advocacy by this coalition. And Humane World for Animals has openly described the French announcement as a major step towards ending imports of hunting trophies and has called for action at European Union level.
This is important. The campaign is not ultimately about paperwork at French customs. The organisations behind it have made their objective abundantly clear: they seek to end trophy hunting itself.
France’s import prohibition may therefore be presented as a conservation measure, but its practical consequence is to undermine the economic model that makes regulated hunting viable. If enough Western importing countries follow France’s example, the international market for hunting will progressively collapse. That is, in effect, a de facto international ban on regulated hunting by economic attrition.
And who pays the price? It will not be the campaign organisations sitting in European capitals. It will be African landowners. It will be rural communities. It will be professional hunters, trackers and guides. It will be wildlife departments struggling to finance conservation. And ultimately, it will be wildlife.
The people who live with wildlife must not be forgotten
The communities living alongside elephants, lions, leopards and other dangerous or crop-damaging species are not abstract statistics. They live with these animals every day. They lose crops. They lose livestock. They suffer injuries and deaths. They surrender land to wildlife.
They are expected to tolerate these costs because the international community considers their wildlife to be a global heritage. But wildlife that imposes costs without generating sufficient benefits eventually becomes a liability. That is the fundamental economic reality of conservation.
Whether wildlife generates income through photographic tourism, regulated hunting or another sustainable use, wildlife must have sufficient economic value to remain a competitive land use against agriculture, livestock production and other forms of development.
If France removes one of the most valuable sources of wildlife revenue available to remote African landscapes, it does not remove the economic pressure on those landscapes. It simply makes wildlife less competitive. And when wildlife becomes less competitive, the land does not magically become more valuable for conservation. It becomes available for something else, be it crop production, livestock, and habitat conversion.
The conservation consequences are not theoretical
Botswana’s own CITES Scientific Authority provides an instructive example. Botswana’s latest elephant NDF concludes that regulated safari hunting provides a net benefit to the species, does not constitute a threat to its survival, and that the revenues generated are of crucial importance for conservation and for rural communities. It specifically concludes that controlled safari hunting enhances elephant survival in Botswana. This is not the opinion of a hunting lobby. It is a formal scientific assessment prepared for the CITES process by the relevant national Scientific Authority.
This is precisely the kind of evidence that France should be considering. Instead, France appears to be allowing the political demands of organisations opposed to hunting to override the scientific and institutional processes established to govern international wildlife trade.
Kenya should be a warning, not a precedent to repeat
France would also do well to consider the experience of Kenya. Kenya prohibited sport hunting nationally in 1977. The subsequent history of Kenyan wildlife conservation is complex and cannot honestly be attributed to a single cause. Population growth, land-use change, livestock expansion, habitat fragmentation, poaching and governance failures have all played major roles. But the critical lesson is that removing the legal economic value of wildlife did not make the problem of wildlife conservation disappear.
Peer-reviewed research has documented dramatic wildlife declines in Kenya since the hunting ban and has warned that the prohibition failed to improve the conservation status of wildlife. Other scientific analyses identify demographic pressure, livestock expansion and land-use change as major drivers of the decline.
Even more importantly, Kenya’s experience produced an observation from one of Africa’s most respected conservationists, the late Richard Leakey, that deserves serious consideration.
Speaking at Strathmore Business School in Nairobi, Leakey observed:
“Hunting has never been stopped in Kenya, and there is more hunting in Kenya today than at any time since independence.”
He described the thousands of animals being killed without control through snaring, poisoning and shooting, and warned that the answer was not to pretend hunting did not exist, but to regulate it and make it sustainable.
His conclusion was devastatingly simple:
“Think of a policy to regulate it, so that we can make it sustainable.”
Leakey was making a crucial distinction between regulated, legal utilisation and uncontrolled exploitation.
When governments eliminate the legal economic framework without eliminating demand, they do not necessarily eliminate killing. They can eliminate the control over the killing. That is precisely the danger France should consider.
Even the animal-rights movement’s own research acknowledges the problem
There is another irony that should not be overlooked.
A recent peer-reviewed study involving researchers from World Animal Protection itself acknowledges, in its opening premise, that ending trophy hunting could potentially have negative consequences for species conservation and for human communities dependent upon hunting revenue.
A related peer-reviewed study by researchers including World Animal Protection’s Neil D’Cruze and Angie Elwin specifically investigated whether trophy-hunting revenue could be replaced by a proposed tourist levy. Its very existence demonstrates that the removal of hunting revenue creates a conservation-financing problem that must somehow be addressed.
In other words, even those campaigning most aggressively against hunting recognise that removing hunting can remove conservation revenue. Their proposed solution is to replace it with a hypothetical alternative. But African countries cannot conserve wildlife on hypothetical promises. They need money now. They need anti-poaching teams now. They need habitat management now. They need compensation and mitigation for human-wildlife conflict now. They need communities to have a reason to tolerate wildlife now.
France cannot impose European values on African landscapes without accepting the consequences
France is blessed with beautiful countryside and a remarkable natural heritage. But France does not possess the extraordinary concentrations of large, dangerous and space-demanding wildlife found across much of Africa.
A French farmer dealing with a wild boar destroying his crops does not face the same conservation dilemma as a Zimbabwean villager whose crops are destroyed by elephants, or a rural family living alongside lions, leopards and elephants.
The African conservation landscape is fundamentally different. Southern African countries have developed conservation systems that are among the world’s most successful precisely because they have learned to combine wildlife, habitat, private ownership, communal rights, sustainable use and economic incentives.
These countries have not stumbled upon sustainable-use conservation by accident. They have developed it through decades of experience. And, in many cases, their wildlife populations have increased dramatically under these models.
France should be asking:
Why would we dismantle a conservation model that is working?
Not:
How quickly can we prevent Africans from using it?
The danger of setting a precedent
We recognise that France’s decision does not itself prohibit hunting in Africa. It prohibits the import of the resulting trophies. But that distinction may prove academic in the long term.
A hunting safari is an international economic activity. If hunters cannot legally return their trophies to their home countries, the economic incentive to undertake those hunts will progressively disappear.
If France succeeds in persuading other European countries, the United Kingdom, the United States and other Western nations to follow, the consequences for African hunting operators and wildlife areas could be profound. This is why we must look beyond the wording of the French measure.
The ultimate objective of the organisations campaigning for these restrictions is not merely to regulate trophy imports. It is to eliminate regulated trophy hunting. The French Government should not allow itself to become the instrument through which that ideological objective is imposed upon African sovereign states.
Conservation cannot be dictated by sentiment
Mr President, we respectfully ask you to consider the fundamental principle at stake. We do not ask France to endorse every hunting practice in Africa. We do not ask France to accept every quota. We do not ask France to ignore illegal or unsustainable hunting.
We ask France to trust science, sovereign African institutions and the CITES system that France itself helped create and supports.
Where a hunt is demonstrably unsustainable, CITES already provides mechanisms to stop it. Where an NDF cannot be supported, an export permit should not be issued. Where laws have been broken, specimens should not enter international trade. Where quotas are excessive, they should be reduced. That is responsible conservation.
A blanket political prohibition is something else entirely. It substitutes ideology for science. It substitutes European preference for African decision-making. And, most disturbingly, it risks removing the very economic incentives that have persuaded landowners and communities to retain wildlife rather than convert their land to more profitable uses.
Mr President, we therefore respectfully call upon you to reconsider
President Macron, you have previously demonstrated an understanding that hunting and conservation need not be enemies.
Your Prime Minister has long understood the importance of hunting and rural communities.
Your Minister for Ecological Transition comes from a government that has itself recognised the importance of science-based wildlife management.
This makes the present decision particularly difficult to reconcile with the principles you have previously defended.
President Macron we therefore respectfully but firmly urge you to reconsider this policy and, at a minimum, to suspend its implementation pending meaningful consultation with the African range states whose wildlife, rural economies and communities will bear the consequences.
France should be working with Africa, not prescribing conservation policy to Africa. If France believes that CITES safeguards are inadequate, France should work within CITES to strengthen them. If France believes an African NDF is scientifically deficient, France should engage with the relevant Scientific Authority. If France believes that hunting revenues are not reaching communities, France should work with African governments to improve benefit-sharing. If France wants to conserve threatened species, France should help ensure that those species have greater economic value alive than the competing land uses that threaten their habitat.
But France should not remove that value and then congratulate itself for having protected the animals. That would be conservation by symbolism. And Africa cannot afford conservation by symbolism. The animals cannot afford it. The communities cannot afford it. And ultimately, neither can the global conservation community.
The real test of conservation is not whether a policy makes Europeans feel better about wildlife. The test is whether it leaves more wildlife, more habitat and stronger incentives to conserve them for the generations that follow. We respectfully submit that France’s present policy fails that test.
Please accept, Mr President, the assurance of my highest consideration
Yours sincerely,
Pieter Swart
Chairman
Sustainable Use Coalition of Southern Africa (SUCo-SA)
The following twelve members of SUCo-SA – representing some 8,000 businesses, 100,000 individual members, and 500,000 employees – are: Confederation of Hunting Associations of South Africa (CHASA); National Hunting and Shooting Association (Natshoot); Parrot Breeders of South Africa (PVSA/PASA); Private Rhino Owners Association (PROA); SA Veterinary Association Wildlife Group (SAVA WG); South African Wingshooters Association; South African Predators Association (SAPA); South African Taxidermy and Tannery Association (SATTA); The True Green Alliance (TGA); Wildlife Ranching Namibia (WRN); Wildlife Ranching South Africa (WRSA); WRSA Foundation NPC