In Namibia, as elsewhere in southern Africa, arguments about land reform tend to be about the redistribution of formerly white-owned freehold ranches to blacks, rather than the landless. Not surprisingly, the winners in newly independent Namibia are the black elite. Their position is reinforced by the belief that the only environmentally sound way to manage the land is to subdivide it into ranches because traditional open-range pastoralism is environmentally destructive. This point of view, which is at variance with an increasingly large body of research, is sustained by the conservative political leadership who are the immediate beneficiaries of this policy.