UCLA Anderson MBA students conduct Applied Management Research (AMR) projects in lieu of a thesis. The nation’s first business school field study program, AMR partners students with top organizations to solve a key strategic problem. The Center for Global Management sponsored four UCLA Anderson Class of 2018 teams to work with Conservation International, which partners with indigenous groups internationally and pairs local expertise with student consultants.
This story is one of the four by students who collaborated with CI to help find sustainable solutions to enhance economies in environmentally sensitive parts of the world. UCLA Anderson Class of 2018 AMR students made their final presentations on March 9.
By Shivesh Bakshi, Brendan Joseph McNickle, Marianne Elizabeth Monroe, Richard Eric Mopas, Nitya Ramaswami (Class of 2018)
“Elephants are killing us!”
This is the jarring, personal testimony of a cattle farmer in Botswana. It directly challenges a first-world (mis)understanding of “conservation” and demonstrates how environmental and habitat conservation efforts cannot be pursued as a one-note campaign to save land and wildlife. Conservation is a balancing act affecting both the Earth’s most vulnerable natural ecosystems and the livelihoods of people who live there. Vital biodiversity includes human beings.
In human settlements that overlap with elephant migration routes, elephants will venture into fields to feast on (and destroy) gardens and grazing land. This problem is complicated by the fact that many elephants are fleeing poachers in neighboring nations that may not have the same protections in place as Botswana’s pro-conservation government. The protected lands of the Okavango Delta are designed to provide sanctuary.
Our field study team heard the farmer’s impassioned speech about human-wildlife conflict last January at a Conservation Agreement Training Workshop in Maun, Botswana, with an audience of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) representatives, Conservation International (CI) facilitators, cattle farmers and community leaders from across the Ngamiland region of northwest Botswana. The workshop initiated a dialogue between CI and communal cattle farmers to design conservation agreements benefiting both parties and hold each accountable from day one.
Conservation International is interested in the communal cattle farming practices of Ngamiland because decades of uncontrolled grazing led to severe soil degradation. The declining health of herds has made it prohibitively expensive for farmers to sell their livestock to local buyers. Farmers receive minimal revenue after mandatory slaughter fees, high transportation costs and beef yield that commands a low price per kilogram. Compounded by the fact that northern Botswana is a designated Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) zone, the market faces severely limited export access, highly restrictive slaughtering regulations and a downward spiral of complacency and desperation.
Since 2013, CI’s social enterprise Meat Naturally Pty. (MNP) has successfully addressed similar conditions in FMD-zone South Africa and introduced sustainable grazing and herding practices across the country. A CI consultant recently developed a mobile abattoir technology (think slaughterhouse-on-wheels) that can further unlock value and gain buy-in from livestock farmers in areas where live transport is not an option.
During the fall and winter quarters of the 2017–2018 academic year, our AMR team supported CI in its efforts to adapt MNP’s South African business model to assess the uniquely challenging landscape of Ngamiland. In addition to strategic recommendations and financial analysis for Botswana, the team updated MNP’s 2016 business model, as developed by a previous UCLA Anderson AMR team, with actual cost and production data from the past three years.
Our team spent a total of three weeks in the field between Johannesburg, Cape Town, Gaborone, Maun and Gumare. Research was spread across two trips to the African continent. In November 2017, Marianne and Richard traveled to Botswana to conduct extensive market research and to interview key players throughout Botswana’s beef value chain. The trip was made possible in large part because we were accompanied by Conservation South Africa (CSA) CEO Sarah Frazee, CSA consultant Tiego Mpho and CI CEO M. Sanjayen.
Marianne and Richard’s findings led to the development of an informed list of 13 scenarios, each providing a strategy for MNP to enter Botswana, with varying degrees of difficulty, cost and environmental/economic impact. The client’s response to these scenarios informed priorities for the second research trip.
In January 2018, Brendan and Nitya visited CSA consultants in Johannesburg, spent three days with Sarah in CSA headquarters in Cape Town and dedicated five days to additional on-the-ground research in Maun (where they also attended the Conservation Agreement Workshop). With the support of Tiego and CSA consultant Caroline McCann, the team filled in critical gaps in the financial model (e.g., water costs from Utility Commission officials, carcass purchase price/quantity from grocery store butchers). The team expanded its understanding of the beef market in Botswana and tracked down highly relevant developments from within the political sphere. For example, the Botswana Meat Commission is considering a mandatory, government-run quarantine for Ngamiland cattle prior to slaughter.
We recommended the MNP social enterprise enter the Ngamiland beef value chain as an intermediary between farmers and red meat buyers. Under our recommendation, MNP would implement the same sustainable grazing practices used in South Africa, while purchasing and operating the CI consultant’s mobile abattoir unit to connect communal, participating farmers with beef purchasers in the Maun area. To account for the unpredictability of the supply side, demand side and regulatory players, we developed a flexible sensitivity model to accompany our final recommendations and financial projections. Levers included price paid to farmers, price received from buyers and MNP production figures (e.g., slaughter days per year, number of cattle slaughtered per slaughter day, average carcass weight).
The opportunity to participate, study and contribute in this space is tremendous and would not be possible without the leadership and support of UCLA Anderson and the Center for Global Management.
Good Post about AMR Projects. I reall like this thesis. Thank you for sharing!!
Posted by: Georgia Aby | 03/30/2018 at 01:22 AM