Lifestyle – Wellness & Fitness · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

A safari lodge sells stillness and space, but its margins are written on the back of a fuel receipt and a grocery invoice. The room rate at a camp in the Okavango or near Kasane is the part guests see; the part that decides whether the camp clears a profit is the cost of getting food, diesel and gas to it, often along an unpaved track and into a kitchen with no grid behind it. When global food and fuel prices move, the floor under a lodge's margin moves with them, and the operator finds out months before the guest ever does.

The FAO Food Price Index tracks the world cost of food baskets each month, and Botswana, a heavy net importer of processed food, feels that index through landed prices in Gaborone and Francistown before it reaches a lodge pantry in Maun. Fuel does the same work twice over: it lifts the cost of the supply run and the cost of the generator that runs the camp off-grid. The remote operators, the ones furthest from a tarred road, carry the highest exposure of all, because every input arrives with a transport surcharge stacked on top of the world price.

Two indices, one squeezed margin

For a Pula-earning lodge billing many guests in US$, a soft Pula can cushion the headline room rate even as it raises the import bill, leaving the operator to manage a margin squeezed from both ends at once. The lever within reach is procurement discipline: longer supply contracts that lock a price, fuller trucks that spread the freight, and local sourcing wherever the quality and the supply hold. None of it is glamorous, and all of it decides whether a camp survives a bad year for world food prices.

The cheapest seat in a safari camp is the one closest to a supplier.

Sources: FAO