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The richest Dutchman owns estates in Scotland, England and the Netherlands, and now he is turning to Africa. In the past five years, Paul van Vlissingen has made himself the largest private operator of African national parks. Last year he put 聙18 million of his own money into projects from South Africa to Ethiopia. So what does he get in return? Is he the saviour of rural Africa or a land-grabbing menace? Fred Pearce hears him out.

Where did the money come from that allowed you to buy into Africa?

Our family has been the best-known industrial family in the Netherlands for 200 years. I am the ninth generation. We have always traded all over the world in fuel and consumer goods. My family, I admit, has played an enormous part in environmental destruction. We were instrumental in killing the Rhine. We had the largest transport fleet on the river in the 19th century, and we re-engineered the river to take out all the curves. It made it more productive for us, but it also killed the salmon, and today the flooding problems are much worse because the water flows downstream much faster.

I鈥檓 sure my ancestors never realised that one day we would have to put huge sums of money back into the system to create new areas for the river to flood 鈥� areas that existed naturally before they eradicated them. I cannot criticise them. Nobody can see the problems future generations will face. We always have to solve the problems that we confront in our own generation.

How did you come to be confronted by the problems of Africa?

It all started when I met Nelson Mandela the first time he came to Holland, in 1998. We got into a discussion about why ecology was not high on the priority list of the South African government. He said he needed to help the poor before he could think about wildlife. I said that the very poorest people in Africa live in the remotest areas, where his programmes on education and water and housing weren鈥檛 working. But in those very remote areas, properly run national parks could benefit both wildlife and the poor. Right there, he asked me to come up with a proposal 鈥� so I did. That is how we relaunched the Marakele national park in South Africa as a public-private partnership in 2003. Marakele had been collapsing; now it is one of the top three parks for tourists in South Africa.

For tourists, maybe, but what about the local people?

No park will survive in the long run unless it is supported by the people living in and around it. They need to know there is something better to do with a zebra than eat it, that they can benefit from protecting it.

Our management philosophy is completely different from anything that has been there before. We say that the villagers in and around our parks should see the park rangers as people who will help them, not as policemen who go round beating up anybody they think is poaching. Our rangers visit the villages and ask if there is anything they can do. There is a lot of physical suffering there: hunger, malaria, AIDS, people being mauled by lions. Our rangers have radio equipment, so they can get doctors or medicine. We offer security, too. In Liuwa, our park in Zambia, there were 60 or 80 murders a year before we went there. In the first year that we were there, that number went down to 26, the next year to two.

But you do also aim to stamp out poaching?

Of course. We have set up an anti-poaching fund, which has been a great success. In Liuwa, where 20,000 people live in the park, we provide a total of $48,000 a year. That is serious money, and the villagers decide how to spend it. They might opt for hammer mills to crush meal, irrigation pipes, or fences to keep out elephants. The only thing we ask of them is not to poach. If we see one zebra poached around a village, the village gets less money: $200 less for the first, $300 less for the second.

We say, make your choice. If you poach we will of course arrest you because that鈥檚 the law, but it鈥檚 your decision. I find that in the whole of Africa, if you approach the problem like a business deal, it works. Poaching has decreased dramatically in Liuwa.

That鈥檚 the ideal, then, that people and wildlife should live in harmony. But in Ethiopia this year, you took over a park on condition that the government first threw out all the inhabitants.

This is Nechisar national park. The government had told us that it was going to resettle the Kore and Guji tribes outside the park. It was a political decision, and there was European Union support for it. We said that we could work with people in the park, as we do in Zambia, but they said no. We didn鈥檛 want to be involved in the resettlement, so I put a clause in the contract that said we wouldn鈥檛 take over the park until the resettlement was completed.

Supporters of the tribes say they were thrown out to make way for tourists.

It wasn鈥檛 like that. The minister I dealt with told me the Guji shouldn鈥檛 have been there. They moved in during the chaos that ensued after Mengistu left power 15 years ago. A Guji professor in the capital, Addis Ababa, says they were there a few decades ago. I don鈥檛 know. I just listen.

You are now planning to take over another part of Ethiopia, the Omo park and the surrounding land of the Mursi people. The Mursi fear they will be forced off their land. Will they?

No. That would be counterproductive. The idea is to protect a huge ecosystem that has a lot of elephants and people living in it. It is a whole new management idea: to combine national parks with hunting areas. And it would be the largest such project in Africa. Nobody will be asked to leave the area; no fencing will be erected. We are in discussion with the Sudanese government over a plan to include the Boma park just over the border, making a transboundary park.

鈥淲e don鈥檛 take the land from the people. They can still have their cattle if they don鈥檛 abuse the land鈥�

This is a huge vision, taking over great tracts of African bush. Can it work?

I think the only circumstance in which it cannot work is when there is civil war. Emotions run so high in places such as Garamba in eastern Congo. We have been trying to save the northern white rhino there, but I cannot see us easily coming to an understanding with the local people. And in Zambia we refused to take over a park near the border with Angola, because it would mean sending 30,000 refugees from the Angolan civil war back to an area where there were still millions of landmines. We could not do that.

But besides war, there is nothing stopping you?

Long-term finance is also a problem. Unfortunately, I don鈥檛 believe that the great majority of parks in Africa can be financed wholly through tourism. I wish I could be convinced of that, but I haven鈥檛 been. Parks have to be financed in the same way as a museum or a national gallery: partly by the state, partly by wealthy people and partly commercially.

I am spending a lot of my own money now. But eventually the money from Paul van Vlissingen will run out. What I hope is that if people like me can show that parks can be managed professionally by outsiders, then institutions such as the World Bank and the European Union will accept part of the financial burden. We already get some money from the US State Department.

That sounds like colonialism by the back door.

It鈥檚 not. I want to protect the culture of Africa. If you don鈥檛 have respect for the culture, and just flood a place with tourists, then you take away something of value. I think parks can give African people a new respect.

But their culture is tied to the land. If you take over the land, won鈥檛 you change everything?

We don鈥檛 take the land from the people. They can still have their cattle if they don鈥檛 abuse the land. But the whole of Africa, I think, understands that things have to change. You cannot freeze cultures and economic situations in Africa when everyone else on the planet has cars and TVs and education and hospitals. It will create huge tensions if you hang on to the nostalgic view that you can.

Your 320-square-kilometre Scottish estate must have had thousands of people on it until the Highland Clearances of 200 years ago. Do you have plans to bring back the crofters?

Ha! Your comparison is a bit of a fantasy. I think I am accepted in Scotland, as I am in Africa, because I care for the local people. You can鈥檛 just be a landowner. You have to be part of the local community too.

So if your motivation isn鈥檛 to right past wrongs 鈥� whether they be those of your own family or those of Scotland鈥檚 former rulers 鈥� what is it?

I have been extremely lucky in my life. I was born at the beginning of the second world war, and I survived the hunger at the end of it, in which hundreds of thousands of Dutch people died. I was very, very hungry, but I lived. Much later, I survived what looked like terminal cancer. Now in the last part of my life, I feel I should put something back. That is my motivation. I am enjoying it as well, by the way.

Some would say you are playing with people鈥檚 lives to satisfy your own ideals.

Maybe. But I鈥檓 proud that I鈥檝e made a difference in parts of Africa, that I鈥檝e made lives better. And I鈥檓 going to make a difference in Ethiopia and Sudan, starting this year. Apart from the cross-border park, we鈥檝e just been invited by the Sudanese government to consider taking over the management of the Red Sea coral reefs.

You鈥檝e got a Scottish estate, a Dutch castle, a chunk of English downland and all these African parks. Which do you like best?

I think the best is sitting under a thorn tree in Africa. We have spoilt so much of Europe. Have you noticed how we rarely see the Milky Way here? There is too much light pollution. When I鈥檓 in Africa I see it every night. What is economic development when you can鈥檛 see the stars?