Last week, five southern African nations agreed to create the world's largest international conservation area in an effort to protect a vast array of animals, bird and plants endangered by poaching.
The protections include rhinos in Namibia, where Minnesotan Jeff Muntifering now lives and works as a conservation biologist for the Minnesota Zoo.
Muntifering grew up in Sartell and now works with the Save the Rhino Trust. The group has had a lot of success in the efforts to end rhino poaching.
While Namibia has had some successes, South Africa most certainly has not. That's where most of the poaching is occurring and South Africa is not one of those five nations creating the conservation area.
Muntifering said poaching has gotten much worse, just in the past year.
There are estimates that more than 700 rhinos were poached last year in Africa, about two per day. That's a 33 percent increase since 2010. Of those 700, nearly 450 were poached in South Africa -- mostly in Kruger National Park.
A spike in demand from Asia has likely caused the increase in poaching, including an unfounded rumor in Vietnam in 2007 of a senior politician claiming to have been cured from cancer by ingesting a traditional medicine that contained ground rhino horn, Muntifering said.
"And this thing went viral, and before you knew it, the demand hit the black market," he said. "And for the past four years, you've seen poaching numbers escalating."
By contrast, Muntifering said there has been no poaching in Namibia, where he works and where more than a third of the world's remaining black rhinos live. While no country - not even Namibia - was immune to a wave of poaching in the 1970s and 1980s, Muntifering said Namibia took a different path by incorporating locals into solution.
Natural benefits like a lower population density than South Africa are part of the reason for success in Namibia, but he also credits a government program there that enables local communities to license enterprises like hunting and tourism to private companies, with the revenues all staying in the local community.
"We have a very, I think, unique strategy for addressing the poaching, and our results stand opposed to the rest of the rhino range states," he said. "They really engaged them to go from poaching to protectors."
The strategy is unheard of across most of Africa, Muntifering said.
"You can operate a lodge, but you'll also have to pay a bed levy, or you must hire 50 percent of your staff from the local community," he said. "It's completely up to them; not a single penny goes back to the central government."
Using this same model in South Africa isn't so easy, Muntifering said. Most countries across Africa still sit in a "colonial legacy" of what he calls "fortress conservation" - the idea that protected animals are put in a national park or behind some fence to protect them.
"The local people had absolutely no reason to want to keep their natural resources and wildlife alive," he said.
There is a growing debate in southern Africa now about legalizing the horn trade as a way to decrease poaching.
Darren Taylor, Voice of America reporter based in Johannesburg, South Africa, recently published a five-part series about rhino poaching and laid out the arguments on both sides of a legalized rhino trade.
"On the one side, you have the ranchers - the actual rhino owners," he said. "They seem to mostly be in favor of legalization at this stage. They argue a legalized trade in rhino horn will control it; the relevant authorities then can step in and control the flow of rhino horn into the market. And in this way, they argue the criminal syndicates will be shut down and poaching will cease."
There is also an argument that South Africa should be allowed to sell its existing stock of horns - there are many horns stored by the government or other authorities from horns of rhinos that have died naturally or in fights with other rhinos, Taylor said. If these are released gradually on the market, the government could gauge actual demand for rhino horns.
"Now, the conservationists and environmentalists who I've spoken to are completely against - at this stage - a legalized rhino horn trade," he said. "They argue it's unclear exactly how big the demand is for rhino horn - and if the demand is too large, the legal trade won't stop the poaching but could in fact fuel further poaching."
The full Muntifering interview: