December 1, 2000
SMALL WIN, FAINT HOPES / A COMMUNITY DIES, BUT NOT WITHOUT NOTICE
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Vanderbijlpark, South Africa-The 360-acre farm with its eucalyptus trees, cornfields and blue and white house has been in Louis Muller's family for five generations, but by this time next year, it will be gone.
So too will the modern, five-bedroom home with the swimming pool that Muller's friend, Johnny Horne, built for his family, and the gas station Horne owned and operated that paid for his dream house. In fact, entire neighborhoods in this community 70 miles southwest of Johannesburg are rapidly disappearing, leaving only the rubble of gutted homes, the meadows where cows and sheep once grazed, and a gargantuan, smoke-belching steel factory that is blamed for polluting the soil and water and driving the residents out.
After a years-long battle with Iscor Ltd., which owns the plant, residents in May accepted the steel company's offer of a 33-million rand ($ 4.8-million) buyout of their properties. It was a groundbreaking case for South Africa, marking the first time a company had buckled under community pressures to compensate people for environmental damage it was accused of causing, but it has been a bittersweet victory.
"I'm happy with the money, but I've got my business here. I lived here all my life, and I thought I'd leave it to my kids," said Horne, 41, sitting at the deserted gas station he bought eight years ago that has seen little business since people started moving out. "Now at this late stage, I have to start a new life."
Across Africa, as people begin feeling the effects of generations of environmental abuse, they are learning that only through drastic life changes can they stop destruction of the continent's land, water and wildlife. In the case of Horne and hundreds of other people living in an industrial heartland, that meant choosing to take on big business rather than live with the problem any longer, ultimately forcing the company to change its attitude toward residents but uprooting themselves in the process.
Elsewhere in Africa, it means accepting the idea of smaller families to reduce pressure on the land, resisting the temptation to make a quick buck by hunting endangered animals, and thinking about the long-term consequences of maintaining lifestyles that once seemed acceptable but that today threaten to leave future generations with a scorched environment devoid of arable land, clean water, or soil-protecting trees.
In short, it means a new mind-set, something difficult to achieve on a continent where most people live hand-to-mouth existences and can barely afford to feed themselves on a daily basis, much less consider how their children will survive 20 years from now.
"They're not stupid. It's just that when you have to struggle to feed your family today, you can't think about what's going to happen years in advance," the primate researcher, Jane Goodall, said in July as she marked the 40th anniversary of her arrival in Africa with an appeal for individuals to pick up where governments have failed, and accept that only they can save their own environment. "If everybody understood that their actions made a difference, what a different world it would be."
Horne, an unlikely activist who speaks English with a thick Afrikaans accent and has the rugged, ruddy look of the blue-collar worker that he is, decided to take action several years ago after the people of Vanderbijlpark, his nondescript town of stucco homes, small farms and dirt roads, began noticing something strange. When it rained and the water from the canal flowing out of the steel factory in the center of town spilled over its banks, a white, crusty substance would remain in the fields. Horne's water at home began tasting bad, and he noticed a foul smell around his gas station and auto repair shop, which is less than 100 feet from a huge slag dump on the edge of the factory.
Muller's once-thriving corn crops became stunted, and the land that had once produced 4 to 5 tons per hectare began yielding only 1.5 tons. "The cows were suffering miscarriages, but the worst problem was the sheep. Lots of sheep were dying. The vet said it was heavy metal poisoning," said Muller, taking one of his last walks on the farm, from where the Iscor chimneys are clearly visible. He lost 100 fruit trees in three years to illness, and his neighbor, whose sheep used to drink straight from a dam fed by the canal, lost 117 animals in a year. "That used to be a forest," Muller said, looking at a collection of stumps where the eucalyptus trees once grew. "Some days you can see definitely there's oil on the water," he said, referring to the canal, which runs along one edge of his farm. "The stink of the water-it smells like tar."
Horne, who once worked inside Iscor, said he never wanted to force the plant to close, because that would have put 9,000 people out of work. He wanted only to force it to clean up the water and soil in the area and to ensure that it remained safe. The case finally ended up in court in 1997, Horne says, because it was the only way to prove to Iscor that the residents were serious. "The attitude of Iscor was that they were big and they could do whatever they wanted because they had been doing it for so long," Horne said. "The most important thing for me was to get the people out of this area, to get on with their lives."
The case has come to be dubbed the Erin Brockovich case because of the similarities between the South Africans' situation and that involving Brockovich, who won a record-setting amount in her suit alleging industry had sent dangerous pollutants into the water of a small California town. In both cases, the defendants faced almost-insurmountable odds, but in both cases they persuaded regular people who had never before been involved in such a thing to persevere.
Iscor, which began trucking drinking water to residents of the area in April, 1997, still denies responsibility for the pollution problems but says it decided to bring in clean water and buy out the land-5,700 acres' worth-to be able to keep its factory going. Plans are under way, it said in a faxed reply to Newsday questions, to ensure no effluent will come from the plant by the year 2005.
Iscor's neighbors haven't wasted any time leaving. The road skirting the factory, and the neighborhoods tucked away in the nearby trees, are now lined with neglected gardens and vacant houses whose roofs and walls have been bashed in by Iscor to prevent squatters from moving into the abandoned homes. "It's depressing living in an area like this, with all the houses being broken down, " Horne said. "It's really hell."
But it is also seen as a promising shift in the way people here, at least, view their responsibility for fighting for their rights to clean water, air and land -a new concept in Africa, but one that activists say is crucial to the continent's future as population growth increases pressure on the environment.
Can the success of the Vanderbijlpark case be emulated in other less-developed countries facing different types of environmental problems? It is being tried on a variety of levels, with different degrees of success. A common thread is the involvement of outside environmental agencies and regular people, who have learned from experience that most governments are either unwilling or unable to do the job.
"The reality is you can't wait for the government to do it," said Roger Fotso, an environmentalist in Cameroon, where illegal trade in bush meat is threatening to destroy primate populations. "The government puts policies on paper. We put them into practice. Frankly, I think that's the only future here."
One local group, the Forest Pipers, travels to villages in the forests putting on plays emphasizing the need to preserve the environment. "I'm optimistic because quite recently, several of the villages have started arresting hunters," said David Hoyle of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which sponsors the drama group and several other programs in the region. "They're now realizing that it is up to them. The government's not going to protect these forests, so they have to do it themselves."
Across the continent in western Tanzania, subsistence farmers are learning to plant in contours to prevent soil runoff during the rainy season and preserve the region's dwindling arable land. Their children are leaving school with agricultural skills passed on by people such as Aristides Kashula, who grew up in the region and now works with Tacare, a program instituted by Goodall to save Tanzania's chimpanzee habitats.
"If they continue at this rate, these hills will be completely bare," Kashula said, standing in the village of Chankele, where pupils are being taught the dangers that deforestation poses to farmers and to the wild animals. "Our intention is not to be here forever, so we want to educate them so they can continue after we're gone."
Such successes are a "drop in the bucket" compared with what's happening in most of Africa, admits Goodall, who compares the state of Africa's environment to that of a ship heading for a crash with a rocky cliff. "But you know, when you're in a big ship it takes time to change course," she said.
Time, though, is not something Africa has. At current rates of destruction, there are fears that in the next century, major primates will become extinct, Lake Victoria will no longer produce enough fish to sustain the population living on its shores, and most of the continent's forests will be gone.
"I wish we had started in the 1960s, because then we wouldn't have lost all of this land, all of that natural, beautiful forest," said Emmanuel Mtiti, co-director of Tacare in Tanzania. "But you don't realize what is happening because it's not like it happens overnight. It happens slowly, and finally you just say, 'Oh! Where are all those forests?They are all gone.' But by then, it's too late."
November 30, 2000
THE CLOUDS OF SUSPICION / MANY BELIEVE SOUTH AFRICA'S INDUSTRIES EMIT TOXINS THAT KILL
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Durban, South Africa - Jodache Naidoo was a bundle of tireless energy, a 4-year-old who never napped and who had to be practically forced to go to bed each night. To call him rambunctious would have been an understatement, but suddenly last December, that changed.
He began sweating from fever through his pajamas at night and complained of stomach pains. He lost his playful streak and eventually his appetite. After weeks of visiting doctors, his worried parents were told in February that their youngest child was wasting away from cancer of the stomach.
"It really broke us," said Jodache's mother, Mavis, standing in the small, homey living room of the family's house in Merebank, a middle-class suburb in a small valley whose skyline is dominated by towering chimneys churning clouds from two refineries and a paper mill situated amid the narrow residential streets. "It really flattened me."
Worse yet, the Naidoos discovered that at least 10 other children within a few blocks of their home had either died of cancer in recent years or were suffering from it, including a 3-year- old down the street who had died last year, and a 7-year-old and an 8-year- old on the next avenue who had died in 1992 and 1997. The one thing they had in common, along with dozens of other children and adults living in adjacent neighborhoods and suffering a variety of chronic illnesses, was their proximity to the huge industrial complexes, which residents suspect are creating toxic clouds that are slowly killing the people around them.
"Merebank is not a place anymore where you feel you were born here and that you're going to live here all your life and die here," said Mavis Naidoo, whose husband, Sagren, is looking for a new job that would move them far away. "Now, it's like suicide. It's like suicide staying here."
South Africa is sub-Saharan Africa's industrial giant, with gleaming, steaming, flame-spewing refineries and factories producing everything from steel to fertilizers to synthetic fuel. With the heavy industry that helped make it the richest country on the continent, however, comes some of the world's worst pollution, say environmentalists, who blame decades of neglect by past white governments and by the present black leadership.
Ostracized over apartheid, which denied the black majority voting and other basic human rights, South Africa scrambled through most of the 1900s to build up its own industries at home, and its focus on economic concerns often came at the expense of the environment and of the health of people without the means to fight back, says environmentalist Bobby Peek. Lax rules enabled domestic and foreign industries to escape internationally accepted environmental standards and to operate freely in neighborhoods designated by apartheid's laws as nonwhite, such as Merebank, an Indian area south of Durban, and neighboring Wentworth. Peek himself grew up on what he calls the "fence line," 200 feet from an oil refinery in Wentworth, which was set aside for "coloreds," or people of mixed race such as himself, and whose residents today breathe the same air as nearby Merebank.
As a child, Peek remembers his friends cooling off in the hot, humid summers by dashing across the road and diving into the wastewater pond of the refinery closest to them, which was not fenced at the time. "I never jumped in it. You could tell it was weird," said Peek, who last year founded an environmentalist organization called groundWork that is trying to educate South Africans about the dangers of industrial pollution. Peek now lives in a pleasant hillside neighborhood whose breezes smell of the nearby Indian Ocean and the tropical flowers blooming in the gardens, but he visits his old home frequently, and little has changed.
On a warm afternoon, standing outside the small but neatly kept bungalow-style houses just a few feet from the refinery, the air has a heavy acrid smell and the sky is hazy from the whitish smoke spewing from the massive complex. Peek had severe respiratory problems as a child, something he blames on the pollution here. "I remember evenings on the IV drip," he said. Three of his friends from the neighborhood died of cancer in their early 30s, as did his mother and a niece, ailments Peek now suspects were linked to the high levels of toxins in the air.
Last May, Peek teamed up with an American environmentalist organization, Communities for a Better Environment, to collect air samples in neighborhoods near industrial sites around South Africa, including south Durban and in Sasolburg and Vanderbijlpark, an industrial center 75 miles southwest of Johannesburg. The results astounded Denny Larson, director of the California-based group, who said some showed the highest toxic- emission levels he had recorded anywhere in the world-30 parts per billion. Larson said the levels are nearly eight times higher than U.S. guidelines recommend and that the toxins include benzene, a known carcinogen.
"On a good day, it's minus 1," Larson said when asked to rate the air quality in places like Sasolburg and south Durban on a scale of 1 to 10. "I'm really shocked, and I don't get shocked that easily. I was shocked over the lack of information and concern about toxic pollution. There's just this lack of recognition, this total ignorance about what has been going on in the outside world. The whole apartheid structure obviously promoted letting industry do whatever it wanted."
The problem, though, is no longer confined to South Africa. With the extraordinary emission levels, environmentalists say it's reasonable to conclude clouds forming here could be dumping acid rain on other parts of the continent, and while South Africa may have the worst industrial and chemical pollution problems in Africa, other less-developed countries are not immune.
In Nigeria's southern oil-producing states, environmentalists for years have accused the government of allowing oil companies to operate under lax standards that lead to constant spills and contamination of soil and water, which in turn destroy the prime source of food and money for people making their living through fishing and farming. Tanzania is faced with the quandary of how to dispose of tons of toxic elements, including DDT, which were shipped to it for use as pesticides by Asian and European countries over the years but never used.
It is not alone. Pierre Portas of the United Nations Environmental Program says there are more than 25,000 tons of obsolete pesticides sitting in various African countries, which received the goods as part of well-meaning development packages from the West. "Some have been there 20 years under tropical conditions. The drums are leaking very, very nasty chemicals, and it is polluting the environment in a very dangerous way," Portas said.
These elements, which were not considered hazardous waste when they came to Africa, do not include the uncounted tons of toxic garbage that have been sent to Africa by brokers working on behalf of western interests trying to unload their deadly materials. This method became common in the 1970s and '80s, when environmental concerns began growing in the West, driving up costs of legal waste disposals at home. Companies began hiring brokers to market their waste elsewhere and targeted the "path of least resistance," said Portas; mainly undeveloped countries with no laws governing waste dumping that were happy to take brokers' payments to accept dirty cargoes. The Basel Convention, which was signed by more than 130 countries, including 28 in Africa, took effect in 1992 and was intended to restrict the transfer of hazardous waste, but illegal dumping still exists, albeit on a secretive level. Now, says Portas, organized crime has become a conduit for carting hazardous material to African countries such as Somalia, whose long coastline, raging war and absence of a functioning government make it a perfect dumping ground for unscrupulous brokers who offer guns in exchange for being allowed to unload their waste.
"Africa is really targeted as a dumping ground by these dealers, because they believe this is the place with the least capacity to control or do something about it," he said. "We are convinced organized crime is now behind it. That's the reason we don't see it anymore, but it doesn't mean it's not as big as before."
Apartheid collapsed in South Africa in 1994 and ended white-minority rule, but the problem here now, says Peek, is that the new government has social problems such as unemployment, crime and AIDS to contend with. As is the case across the continent, environmental issues are relatively low on the South African government's agenda, and with unemployment estimated at about 40 percent, forcing big industry to scale back for the sake of the environment is not palatable.
Peek cites a litany of environmental abuses stemming from industry and affecting regular South Africans, most of them poor and without the means to fight big business in court: the mercury poisoning of workers at a Thor Chemicals plant in Cato Ridge, outside Durban; the toxic-landfill site that sits in the midst of a residential neighborhood in Umlazi outside Durban, and which leaks liquid down the hill onto the street below; the community living between a toxic landfill and a waste incinerator in the coast community of Aloes outside Port Elizabeth; the primary school in Isipingo, outside Durban, where more than 100 pupils in May had to be treated for inhaling chlorine gas that had leaked from a nearby factory.
The situation leaves most people in the position of having to live with the problem or find new places to live, an option few can afford. With no scientific studies proving their suspicions, people like the Naidoos and their neighbors have virtually no legal grounds on which to force the issue with big industry and can only keep collecting data in hopes of one day having enough information to make a case in court. Based on a door-to-door survey conducted in pockets of the area by The Mercury, a Durban newspaper, the rate of leukemia in children in Merebank alone appears to be 24 times higher than the national average. The survey also detailed astounding numbers of other cancers among adults and children elsewhere in the valley, which locals have dubbed the "asthmatic belt" because of the constant wheezing that goes on.
"Almost on a weekly basis we're getting new cancer patients," said Dr. Bharuth Seetharam, who has practiced at the Meremed Medical Center in Merebank for 25 years and describes the number of childhood cancer victims in the area as startling. "I've got so many patients, I don't know what's going on." Virtually every child he sees has respiratory problems, which vanish when the child leaves the area for holidays.
There are currently 11 people being treated at the clinic for various forms of brain cancer. Seetharam suspects the polluted air is to blame but says until a scientific survey is done and illnesses are linked to the elements in the air, residents have few options. "The best piece of advice is to get out of the area," said Seetharam, who moved himself and his family out of the area years ago. "That's the honest truth."
The Naidoos are relatively lucky. Jodache completed his sixth course of chemotherapy in August and appears to be regaining his health, but his 15-year-old brother, Cleevan, suffers respiratory problems that his parents believe are a side effect of the air.
A few blocks away, Subremani Dorasamy, 46, sits dolefully in his house, unable to work anymore because of medical problems, and fearful that he will lose his home because he can no longer afford to pay the monthly bond. He is just a few houses up from one of the refineries, and the blackened chimney dominates the view from his living-room window. Three years ago, Dorasamy lost his job as a factory shift manager after being diagnosed with severe asthma, a condition he blames on living in the shadow of the refineries.
"My chest would get heavy. I kept managing, managing, managing, but finally I couldn't take it anymore," said Dorasamy, who, like most asthma sufferers in this area, had no history of the disease in his family and was otherwise in excellent health. "I'm going to lose this house here, and there's no one to help me. I don't know who to see, what do to," he said, his voice rising in desperation and his breathing developing the wheeze that warns of a pending asthma attack. "I want to live. This is my case," he said, reaching for his breathing pump.
Nearby, Mike and Dolly Moodley, in their 60s, also live with breathing pumps. Each morning they hose layers of black dust off their car, and many nights they awake to a smell, resembling rotten eggs, coming through their open window. "The smell comes like a poison smell. It's a smell that you can't bear," said Dolly Moodley, who has been hospitalized twice in the past year following severe asthma attacks. Thirteen years ago, Mike Moodley's brother died of the disease. Now, both he and his wife suffer from it, and their grown children refuse to visit them because they fear their own children will fall ill.
At Settler's Primary School in Merebank, 96 of the 800 pupils carry pumps to school because of respiratory problems. Rarely does a day go by when Lawrence Vartharajulu, a teacher and the school's pollution-control monitor, doesn't put in a call to the nearby refinery to report a foul smell sweeping through the school grounds. He keeps a log of the problems, from a rotten-egg smell to the burning, acrid odors that cause sore throats and wheezing fits among the children and teachers. Some days, when the smell is particularly strong, the school's absentee rate is as much as 80 percent.
"The kids have been experiencing it for so long they're becoming immune to it," said Vartharajulu, who worries that final exams will be disrupted if children are forced to reach for their oxygen pumps or rush to the sick room when rotten-smelling clouds float in. "They're accepting it as part of their life, and that's wrong."
The area's two biggest industries are the Engen and Sapref oil refineries, and while they acknowledge sending pollutants into the air, they deny exceeding dangerous levels and deny they are causing health problems. They point to a host of other factors, including the nearby international airport and highways that skirt the neighborhood, and to the other industries such as the Mondi paper factory. In short, they say there is no proof linking their operations to the area's unusually high cancer and asthma rates, a fact that residents acknowledge but are hoping to change by conducting their own medical surveys over the next couple of years.
Sapref said it already had reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by 30 percent, "despite there being no evidence our emissions are a direct cause of human lung illness." Tests done within the refinery found Sapref workers suffering no ill effects from the air they breathe, "and we have no reason to suppose the situation beyond our fences is worse."
"Engen refinery's operations are well within South African standards, but we accept these standards need to be revised to become internationally acceptable," said Engen spokeswoman Barbara Manson, who pointed to Mondi and the huge south Durban sewage works as other contributors to air pollution in the area. "In addition there are also approximately 150 smaller industrial companies in the valley, and the (Settler's) school is further impacted by emissions from vehicles, trains and aircraft," Manson said.
South Africa's government acknowledges there are problems posed by industrial polluters, and the minister of environment, Mohammed Valli Moosa, admitted last May after a chlorine leak sent caustic clouds through a school: "For a family...that will in a few years have a child who may be continuously ill, or even mentally affected by the recent gas leaks in Durban a few weeks ago, the action of government to clamp down on polluters of our atmosphere may be coming a little too late." But he said new restrictions were planned, including the withdrawal of permits of companies implicated in toxic leaks. In addition, Valli Moosa has announced a ban on most plastic bags starting next year, part of a broader plan to change South Africans' attitudes toward their environment.
"Simply put, we as a nation have to start to recover a higher percentage of our waste, lest we drown in our own garbage," he said.
Environmentalists praise his words but say the government needs to do more to force big industries to adhere to internationally accepted norms, such as requiring regular checks on factory valves to detect leaks, and regular testing of emissions. "It's literally about 30 years behind anything in the United States and Europe," said Peek, describing the standards by which industries operate in South Africa. "They're doing their operations cleanly in other parts of the world, but they act like they don't know how to run a plant safely in South Africa."
Even though Jodache Naidoo's cancer is now in remission, his parents are bitter at what they and their neighbors have gone through, and they are fearful of the future. "To think that so many children are dead," said Mavis Naidoo, looking at a clipping from The Mercury that listed the names, ages and addresses of dozens of people suffering in nearby homes from various diseases. "Who wouldn't be afraid?"
November 29, 2000
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / THE TROUBLED WATERS / A BOOMING POPULATION'S NEED FOR FOOD, LIVELIHOOD STRAINS AFRICA'S GREAT LAKES
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Jinja, Uganda-On a damp, gloomy morning under a leaden sky barely distinguishable from the silver-gray waters of Lake Victoria, Charles Otim stands on the muddy shore, his eyes fixed on an approaching parade of small boats. He ignores the cold drizzle and the fishy-smelling, scaly sludge that envelops his bare feet and splatters his pant legs as he wades out to meet the weary rowers, who appear to move in slow motion as they labor toward land.
Otim and others who have waited since dawn drag the heavy wooden boats on shore, then peer pensively into each vessel, and into their immediate future. What they see will determine if their families have meat for dinner that night, if their children's school fees are paid, if there is bread for breakfast the next morning. They hope to see slippery, shining mounds of Nile perch, tilapia, and other fish that they can sell to crowds of hovering fishmongers clutching coins and wrinkled notes in cloth pouches.
Most days they are disappointed, and this day is no different.
"These days it is very little, very few fish. I am worried," says Otim, 35, whose boat brought in five fish after 12 hours on the water. Sometimes, the men who row into the sunset each evening and cast their nets return in the morning without a single fish, says Otim, who owns one boat and rents a second.
By the time he has paid the other men who fish for him, Otim might take home 2,000 Ugandan shillings a day, about $ 1.35, out of which he supports his wife and four children. "The income is not enough," he says. He spends each day either waiting for his boats to come in, or on the water fishing. "You have to put in the effort. You have to eat daily."
It is a sign of the difficult times at Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, whose 2,170-mile shoreline laces through three countries-Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya-and whose waters are the lifeblood for about 30 million people. The people who live off Africa's great lakes-Victoria, Tanganyika and Malawi-are suffocating them, fishing them dry to feed burgeoning human populations, and practicing farming and living styles that pour tons of soil, ash, and human and livestock waste into the water.
When the British explorer John Speke discovered the source of the Nile in 1862, at a shady bend now marked by a small beer garden, there were about 4 million people living along Victoria's shores in the area called the catchment. That figure has grown about eightfold in the past century. Major cities such as Entebbe, Mwanza, Kisumu and Jinja have sprung up along the shore, as have thousands of tiny vil- lages. The same scenario has occurred around lakes Malawi and Tanganyika, where the problem has been exacerbated in recent years by hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing wars in Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and settling on fertile lakeside land.
These are not modern metropolitan areas by the standards of the developed world. These are places where people defecate at the water's edge for lack of toilets, where fertilizers and pesticides are allowed to run into the water for lack of irrigation systems, where tons of ash and dust from cooking and land- clearing fires swirl into the skies and come to rest in the water. They are places where some fishermen, desperate for a good catch, have poured poison into the water to kill fish and bring them to the surface, and where people like Otim, desperate to make a living, haul in juvenile fish that by law should be thrown back.
"You'd be crazy to throw anything back," Otim says as he bargains with the fishmongers standing over his meager catch, which includes two obviously juvenile tilapia. "We're supposed to fish only the big fish, but you know, the population keeps expanding, so there are more and more boats. If the population gets bigger, there will be very little fish in the water."
Water quality in all of the lakes is changing, resulting in increases in algae and in weeds such as water hyacinth, which suck away at the oxygen and sunlight that fish and plankton need to survive.
The problem is evident from the choking stench of human waste that wafts through each tiny fishing village, to the clumps of delicately pretty, but noxious, water hyacinth that tumble out of Lake Victoria along the rushing rapids that mark the start of the River Nile.
"What we're looking at is a very vulnerable set of circumstances. The fish have nowhere else to go, and they have characteristics that make them much more prone to extinction than marine or river fishes," said Dr. Anthony Ribbink of Rhodes University in South Africa, who has spent years studying the ecology of Lake Malawi. More than a quarter of the world's fish, 28 percent, live in fresh water, and in the past three decades more of these fish species appear to have suffered extinction- meaning they have not been seen in at least 50 years -than all other vertebrates in the past three centuries, Ribbink said.
In Lake Victoria alone, an estimated 300 species have vanished, due in large part to the changes that occurred as a result of colonialists' importation of the Nile perch for sportfishing and eating. While the fish was a boon for the economies of the countries bordering the lake, its eating habits and large size made it impossible for hundreds of smaller fish to compete for food.
"Maybe in 10 years' time there will be a complete collapse of the fishery, " said Joyce Kabali Akumu, a biologist at the Fisheries Research Institute in Jinja, which is studying ways of improving the lake's health while preserving the lucrative fishing industry. "Certain species will not be seen, and those that are caught will be too small to be considered palatable. If life must continue, the fishing must survive, but so many people believe in the present rather than the future. They say if our grandparents survived, so will we."
It's an attitude born both of the poverty here, which forces people to live day-to-day without the luxury of looking far into the future, and of the boom in the fishing industry, whose economic success has made it easy to ignore the negative consequences.
In the past 30 years, export earnings from Lake Victoria's fish have grown to more than $ 600 million annually for the three countries sharing its water. This wouldn't have been possible without the introduction to the lake of the Nile perch, which gave birth to the lake's fishing industry but which also sparked many of the ecological and social changes that now threaten the lake.
In Uganda, where fish are the No. 2 export after coffee, the number of fish-processing plants has grown from three in 1990 to 11 today, and earnings have soared to more than $ 47 million a year compared with just $ 1.4 million a decade ago. The combined catch in Lake Victoria from Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya each year is larger than from all the Great Lakes in North America. The chance to make a living off fishing has driven more people to the lake, where their activities are harming the water.
Small-time fishermen like Otim are too poor to give up any of their precious catches, even if they include fish too young to have spawned, and the processing plants that churn out products for export to Europe and Asia turn a blind eye to the juvenile fish they receive from commercial-fishing outfits.
The situation has been aggravated by foreign consumers' finicky tastes, laments Ibrahim Kaitira Katonda of the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization. "They like smaller fish with less fat content, which can fit on a dinner plate. That means for Nile perch, it has to be a juvenile fish," Katonda said. "So a small fish is now gold for the market."
The battle facing the countries on these threatened waters is how to balance the market demands that keep the fisheries-and these nations' economies-afloat, with the ecological requirements to keep the lakes alive and productive. "We have developed scientific strategies, but they won't do any good unless we can do something about poverty and overpopulation," said Ribbink, citing the country of Malawi as an example. The crowded, landlocked nation whose people derive 70 percent of their protein from fish is particularly at risk. It is one of the world's 20 poorest countries, according to the United Nations, which last year ranked Malawi 159th out of 174 countries surveyed on their levels of poverty. Its population nearly doubled between 1975 and 1997 to 10.1 million, and it is expected to reach nearly 16 million by 2015. In some regions near the lake, population growth is more than 7 percent annually. Farmers being squeezed by repeated droughts have been forced to turn to fishing.
"On one hand, biodiversity is threatened. On the other hand, you have to feed the people," said Ribbink, who advocates environmental education as well as ecotourism-relatively rare in Africa- that would benefit local communities and show them the value of their natural resources. "Of all the environmental crises we face, I think lack of fresh water is going to be the greatest, and we're up against it in terms of time," he said. "If nothing is done, there is going to be famine, strife and conflict, probably high human migrations, and the problem will just become exacerbated. We'll get beyond the point of recovery."
That point appears to be getting closer. Fish catches in Malawi and in Uganda, which depend upon the freshwater fishing industry far more than sea-facing nations such as Tanzania and Kenya, have been falling since 1993, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, a result of overfishing and the fishing of juvenile fish. Catches of the all-important Nile perch, the main export fish, have plummeted in all the countries bordering Lake Victoria. "Looking broadly at continental areas, neither the present state of nor the short-term outlook for inland aquatic resources is encouraging," the FAO said in a 1998 report. "An increase in the loss and degradation of land and forest resources and of biodiversity and habitat as well as the growing scarcity and pollution of fresh water can be observed in Africa" and other regions of the world, it warned.
But it is not easy in a place like Jinja to persuade people living a hand-to-mouth existence that they should throw back little fish or reduce the numbers of nets they cast. Most people here depend upon fishing not out of choice but of necessity.
Decades of civil war and economic destruction, which reached a crescendo in the 1970s when Idi Amin nationalized British industries and expelled all Asians-they represented a large and wealthy entrepreneurial class-left places like Jinja to shrivel and die. It used to be one of Uganda's most thriving cities, but today, Jinja is a depressed relic of rusted factories, disused train depots and abandoned mansions and resembles the forgotten facade from a Hollywood movie. The old, Asian-built estates are dilapidated, their pastel paint jobs grimy and faded, and their once-gracious gardens overrun with weeds and marabou storks scavenging through piles of garbage. Meagerly supplied shops line the main road, and unemployed young men wander the side streets begging strangers for handouts.
Everyone, it seems, is squeaking by, fishing and farming to supplement whatever incomes they might have, and everything they do affects the lake.
"Most of the people here are supposed to be public servants, earning a living from working for the government, or working in a business or running a shop, but that's not enough anymore," said John Obbo Okaronon, a biologist who has studied the effect of excessive farming on the water quality. "Thirty or 40 years ago, you'd hardly have any cultivation closer than 10 meters from the coastline. There was vegetation there. Now, the water's the limit."
The vegetation provided a natural filtration system that prevented soil and everything in it, including pesticides and human and animal waste, from entering the water. Only the rain falling from the sky entered the lake, maintaining its pristine quality. Now, with more and more people competing for smaller and smaller space on which to grow food, the natural vegetation is virtually gone, leaving the lake vulnerable to a host of damaging elements. "Everything just goes in," Okaronon said.
Using satellite technology, the Kenya-based International Center for Research in Agroforestry last year warned of dramatic increases in nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich sediment pouring into the lake as a result of vegetation loss-just the recipe for water hyacinth. Introduced to Africa from South America as an ornamental plant 100 years ago, the hyacinth today is viewed as one of the greatest threats to Lake Victoria. Growing in a tangled web, it spreads across the water like a blanket, at times making it impossible for fishermen to get their boats through the water and creating stagnant pools that are breeding grounds for human ailments such as malaria, cholera and bilharzia. In a shallow lake such as Victoria, which averages about 210 feet, incoming materials are not easily diluted, so the effects are felt more rapidly.
Despite the obvious difficulty of making a living on the water, people continue to try their luck. Late at night, hundreds of orange flares bob along the black lake as fishermen light their lanterns to attract the tiny, sardinelike fish that are popular among locals, creating a virtual city on the water. At daybreak, landing sites come alive as the raggedly dressed fishmongers gather at the water's edge to barter over what is usually a sparse supply.
In March, some fishermen in Uganda became so frustrated with their measly catches that they started pouring poisonous chemicals into the water. Fish died and floated to the surface to be scooped up by the fishermen and sold to hotels and restaurants. Three people died and dozens were hospitalized in Uganda after eating the tainted fish, prompting the European Union to ban imports of fish from the lake, something the governments of Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya say has cost their countries more than $ 50 million.
"We have too many boats, too many fishermen, and too many nets. A fisherman will never admit he has enough nets," said Micheni Japhet Ntiba, the executive secretary of the fisheries organization.
Peter Odyo, who is lounging under a tree at a landing sight in Wanyange, a few miles from Jinja, is proof of that. "There are fish in the lake, but we don't have enough nets to trap them," said the 25-year-old, who refuses to admit the problem could be too many fishermen. On a good day, his six nets bring in about 10 fish total. Otim is more realistic, acknowledging that there are too many boats on the lake. But there is no alternative, he says. Otim came to Jinja from Kitgum in northern Uganda, where a civil war raging between the government and Sudanese-based rebels had made life too dangerous and destroyed all job hopes.
His dream is to complete a correspondence course in engineering, which costs $ 3,400. At the current rate of his fishing success, it would take seven years of fishing every single day to earn the fee. It's an impossible dream, he acknowledges, as he washes out the bottom of his boats and prepares them for another night on the water.
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / AFRICA'S COSTLY HARVEST / BUSH-MEAT HUNTERS PROFIT FROM TARGETING EXOTIC SPECIES
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Yaounde, Cameroon-A kitten- sized, white-nosed monkey tied by a short rope to a rusty engine block chattered nervously and watched the passersby with round, brown eyes as hawkers tried to sell it for $ 50. At their feet lay more monkeys, but these were dead, their bodies smoked and flattened and their heads, arms, paws and teeth clearly visible as they sprawled on the hot midday pavement.
There is no shortage of bush meat at the buzzing market near Yaounde's train station, and all it takes is a few words of French and an ability to hide your revulsion as the sellers show you their most expensive goods: the blackened, bloodied remains of endangered species such as gorillas and chimpanzees, which are supposed to be protected by international treaty and national law. The market is a few minutes' walk from the government's Ministry of Environment and Forests, which is supposed to be protecting the animals.
"Don't you have anything more exotic?" I said to the salesman as he tried to impress me with his smoked monkeys. Five minutes later, in a dimly lit room off the courtyard of a compound hidden from the street by high walls, he pulled from a sack his priciest and most illegal cut of the day: the upper quarter of a young gorilla. Its hair was scorched off, but the arm, hand and head, complete with a delicate ear and two lines of straight teeth, were unmistakably that of a gorilla, which is supposed to be off-limits to all hunting.
Out of a freezer came more illegal meat: chunks of a python and three frozen pangolins, a type of anteater, both endangered species.
"It's very fresh. Just two days old," he said, gesturing proudly toward the still-bloody rib cage of the gorilla, which resembled a human homicide victim on the floor of the dank room. For about $ 20, it could be purchased, shoved into a plastic grocery sack, and carted away to be served up in some of the city's wealthiest dining rooms.
An estimated 2,200 pounds of bush meat comes through the market at Yaounde each day, and the situation is similar in cities and towns throughout the Congo Basin, despite international conservationists' efforts to stem a trade that threatens to wipe out not only endangered species such as gorillas and chimpanzees-the animals normally associated with the bush- meat trade-but scores of other forest animals such as pythons, drills (large baboons), pangolins, Jentink's duiker (small antelope), and elephants. A yearlong study in Brazzaville, Congo, counted more than 15,000 animal carcasses in the market,
including 293 chimpanzees. In the Gabonese capital, Libreville, about 500 pounds of bush meat is sold weekly, and the bush-meat harvest for Africa is estimated at more than 1 million tons a year, according to various environmentalist groups' reports.
"I hunted everything. We set traps and used guns. I had no money. There were no jobs," said Albin Djebe, a former bush- meat hunter in Cameroon who could earn $ 180 for taking a large gorilla, a veritable fortune for a 26-year-old man with two wives and several children to feed. "It's hard to say how many I killed. A lot. I could say more than 150 each year. We knew it was illegal, but we had to do it because we had nothing to survive on. There are still a lot of hunters. They'd like to stop, but how would they survive?"
The trade is not confined to western Africa. Results of a two-year study of seven eastern and southern African countries by Traffic, which monitors wildlife trade for the World Wide Fund for Nature, says the bush-meat trade is increasing in that region as a result of poverty and lax law enforcement. "Hunting is moving into protected areas, where bush-meat harvest is now the number one illegal activity," said Rob Barnett, the author of the report, which was released in August. With popular species such as buffalo declining, hunters are even turning to zebra and hippo, said Barnett, adding that as in western Africa, most of the bush meat hunted in eastern and southern Africa is then resold for profit and not intended for subsistence.
Twenty years ago, bush meat was something consumed primarily by forest dwellers who hunted only what they needed to survive, and it was nearly impossible to find it in city markets.
Since the mid-1980s, however, roads built for logging trucks have been snaking into previously inaccessible areas teeming with wildlife. Hunters hitch rides on them and bring out exotic meats that wealthy urbanites have come to view as delicacies. Live animals, often the babies of big animals shot for meat, are also brought out and sold to city dwellers as prestige pets, to be kept in cages or confined on heavy chains.
At the Samovar restaurant in central Yaounde, diners sit in a pleasant outdoor garden, while for their entertainment, a white-nosed monkey exactly like the one tied to the engine block sits chained to a tree. If people know this is illegal, they don't seem worried. The restaurant's owner happily shows off the chained animal and encourages visitors to take its picture.
With logging trucks regularly traveling into the woods and back out again with their timber, it has become easy to fuel the illegal meat market. "Nobody gives a toss if it's being transported," said the employee of one French logging company, who said it is common for timber company drivers to cart illegal meat into town by hiding the carcasses between the giant logs on their trucks. " It's widely known that they'll carry anything for a fee," said the employee. The truck drivers bribe forestry officials along the roads to evade inspections and arrive each night in Yaounde, where the illegal meat is unloaded under cover of darkness.
In addition to fueling the commercial market, the huge logging camps deep in the forests have created a need for meat to feed the employees-usually local forest dwellers-so logging companies provide weapons and money to hunters to bring in bush meat daily. A typical encampment has about 200 employees and their families, hence hunters are encouraged to kill big animals, such as gorillas and elephants. And the money to be made has lured officials of the Cameroonian government, which was rated the world's most corrupt in 1998 by the German watchdog group Transparency International. The government is accused of turning a blind eye to the illegal business in exchange for bribes, or providing weapons to hunters in return for a share of their profits.
"It requires sophisticated guns, and where do these guns come from? The government and the military," admitted Vincent Mfomfou of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, which says it doesn't have the money to hire enough guards to prevent such abuse. In one so-called protected forest area of Cameroon, 115 illegal hunting camps recently were discovered.
"We lived through hunting. That's how we paid our school fees and bought things," said Stephen Matute, a former bush-meat hunter who, like Djebe, was persuaded last year to give up that life. Now he works in a sanctuary in Limbe, Cameroon, for bush- meat orphans - mainly animals whose parents have been killed for bush meat, or that have been seized from people keeping them as illegal pets. So poor was Matute that one day he trapped a live python in the bush and brought it to the sanctuary in hopes of selling it for money to buy food. "I was thinking if I had a live viper, I could make a lot of money," he said while preparing to feed the drills at the Limbe sanctuary. "I used a box trap to get it. He went right inside and the box slammed shut."
What Matute hadn't counted on was the sanctuary's response when he arrived with his prize. Instead of giving him money, the sanctuary workers took the snake and told him to come back another day to get paid. The next time he arrived, he brought a rare catlike civet and again was not given any money. This time, though, he began wandering around the sanctuary and was struck by what he saw.
"I was moving round and round to see how the animals behave. I saw especially the chimps. I saw how the animals were eating-just like humans! I started visiting this place all the time. When I went back to the village, I told my friends to come here and see the animals. I tried to tell them the species are endangered. They didn't want to listen. Still I go back to tell them the chimps are almost finished. Sometimes I just lie awake and think about that. I worry," he said.
So does Djebe, who used to earn $ 400 to $ 600 per month hunting in the forests until he was recruited a year ago to work in a Yaounde animal sanctuary for bush-meat orphans. "Whenever I go home I try to talk to the village chief, but the problem is they have nothing else to live on, so people are always tempted to go hunting," he said, shaking his head and admitting that even he considers returning to the hunt. "For now I'm not thinking about going back, but if things don't improve, if I can't live well, then I will be forced to leave the city and go back into the forest."
At current rates of hunting, some conservationists say chimpanzees and gorillas could be extinct within 10 years. Recently, scientists announced the first and possibly only primate extinction of the 20th Century, a type of red colobus monkey once found in Ghana and Ivory Coast whose habitat has been invaded by hunters and loggers.
Sanctuaries such as those in Cameroon are trying to teach locals the value of saving the forests and their inhabitants for future generations by emphasizing the remarkable similarity of humans to animals such as chimpanzees, which share 98 percent of humans' DNA makeup. They explain the potential dangers of contracting deadly viruses such as Ebola from bush meat, and they try to appeal to their emotions. That's not easy in a place where most people have only seen apes housed in filthy cages or confined by heavy chains.
"Part of our thing is to try to teach schoolchildren that they're not scary animals, but when we ask them what they think of gorillas, they say they're monsters," said Nick Cockayne, a volunteer at the Yaounde sanctuary. Like the sanctuary in Limbe, most of the animals here have been seized from their owners, with help from wildlife authorities, or brought in by people such as Matute hoping to make money by selling them.
Some chimps that have been kept as pets arrive with smoking habits. Others have nail polish on. Most exhibit signs of trauma or abuse, such as jumping up and down for hours in one spot, as if on a pogo stick, or rolling up in a corner and refusing to associate with others of the same species.
The level of ignorance toward these animals, whose natural habitat is just a few miles away, is astounding, said Chris Mitchell, a Briton who was traveling through Cameroon six years ago when he became enamored with chimpanzees and decided to open the Yaounde sanctuary. "I've been asked, 'Why are you here preserving Cameroon's gorillas? Why aren't you trying to save the gorillas in England?' I've had people ask me to make a gorilla talk."
Conservationists fear the problem could get worse following the World Bank's decision in May to grant loans for the construction of a 600-mile pipeline that will carry oil from Chad to the Cameroonian coast, cutting through untouched wilderness areas along the way. Just as the logging industry has led to human incursions into the forests, so too will construction of the pipeline, they say.
Nobody expects the bush-meat trade to disappear, and few even say it should. The forest dwellers, such as Gabon's Pygmies, depend upon bush meat to survive, and they don't hunt enough of it to contribute to the extinction of species. Meat provides crucial protein to rural residents who would otherwise go hungry and who can't afford to buy chicken or steak. What conservationists say is necessary is to increase international pressure on governments to enforce environmental laws, and to teach locals to hunt in moderation and to leave alone endangered species such as gorillas and chimpanzees.
"To me, apes are symbolic. They are the closest living relatives we have on Earth," Mitchell said. "If we can't save them, what hope have we got to save any other species, or their environment? You can write off all conservation efforts if we can't save our closest relatives."
November 27, 2000
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / HUMAN STRIFE PREYS ON GORILLAS. SEE MAIN STORY: A LAND STRIPPED BARE
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Bwindi National Park, Uganda-It is not yet 9 a.m., but already the heat is as stifling as a soggy blanket as Caleb Tusime trudges high into the mountains, treading along a steep and narrow path that shoots straight uphill at an exhausting angle and offers no protection from the searing sun. Nearly four hours later, Tusime has found what he was looking for: a group of the rare mountain gorillas that roam these rugged hills.
Like happily gluttonous picnickers after a lavish lunch, they loll quietly in the shady underbrush and grab occasionally at edible leaves that blow their way in the breeze. There are 18 gorillas in this group, including a towering male silverback, but hidden among the bushes, they are barely visible to an untrained eye until the sun hits their luxuriant, red-highlighted coats or catches their glowing brown eyes.
"I like them. They are part of God's creation," said Tusime, who has been tracking gorillas here in Uganda's Impenetrable Forest for nine years. " They're just like us, so there's no need for us to keep killing them."
There are only about 620 mountain gorillas remaining in the Impenetrable Forest and in the hills of neighboring Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and their continued survival depends upon a peaceful habitat. The peace is rarely there, though, which goes a long way toward explaining why these animals-the only mountain gorillas on Earth-have died out so quickly since the 1950s, when the population in Rwanda alone was about 500. The last census in 1989 put the figure there at 310, with another 310 believed to be living in Uganda and Congo.
Poachers used to be the biggest threat to the gorillas back in the 1960s and '70s, when Dian Fossey was doing the research made famous in the 1988 film "Gorillas in the Mist." Today, the problem is war, and the gorillas' precarious situation is a reminder of how political turmoil is linked to the demise of Africa's environment, be it refugees tearing down forests for cooking fires or fighters bringing their battles into the gorillas' limited living space.
"In this part of the world, people have been trying to protect gorillas for 25 or 30 years, but the problems are still the same: poverty and wars, and for the last decade that's gotten worse," said Jose Kalpers of the International Gorilla Conservation Program, which is trying to chart the animals' populations in the region. "So the solutions are simple," he added sardonically. "Stop the poverty. Stop the wars."
Nowadays, visitors trekking into the hills to see gorillas aren't just accompanied by trackers. They also have with them heavily armed soldiers carrying automatic weapons, soldiers who at night comb the thick forests and hiking trails searching for poachers as well as rebels involved in any of the several conflicts plaguing this volatile corner of the world. Each time civil strife flares up, as it has repeatedly in the past decade, the gorillas' secretive habitat-perfect for rebels or refugees looking for a place to hide- is infiltrated and shrinks, both physically and psychologically.
Physically because the presence of people drives the animals elsewhere, usually higher and higher into the volcanic peaks to heights up to about 11, 100 feet, where the air is thinner, the temperatures colder and the climate more hostile than the animals prefer. Psychologically, because gorillas have mental capacities comparable to those of a 5-year-old child, explains Liz Williamson of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International in Ruhengeri, Rwanda, the base for gorilla viewing in Rwanda's Parc National des Volcans. When bad things happen to gorillas or the members of the close-knit groups in which they live, they remember and learn to avoid the dangers, said Williamson, recounting the problems in the park that followed the outbreak of Rwanda's 1994 genocide and civil war.
Research and tourism ground to a halt, and the park's thickly forested hills became a battleground and a makeshift refugee camp as fighting spread across the region. Many of the gorillas, which can live more than 30 years in the wild, showed signs of trauma, such as fear and distrust toward humans to whom they once had become accustomed, when researchers were allowed back into the park after the war. "They were too nervous. We don't know what they experienced in the past, but it couldn't have been too pleasant," Williamson said.
This becomes a problem when researchers, who find an estimated 1,000 illegal hunting snares each year in the park in Rwanda, try to disentangle gorillas that have become trapped in them. After a bad experience with a human, few gorillas are willing to let another come near, even if the person is trying to rescue them from a hunter's weapon.
Reminders of the human presence are still in the park: shredded clothes, old food and garbage scattered where the old, makeshift refugee camps were located. All you have to do is wander through these forests for a few minutes to see why someone would choose them as a hiding place. Even at midday it is dark beneath the growth of trees, whose leaves provide a green ceiling and an instant umbrella when the afternoon rains begin. The vines and branches loop around each other like giant spiderwebs, making it impossible to get anywhere without a machete to chop a path through the thicket.
While Rwanda is relatively calm now, the neighboring countries are not, so the entire region remains tense. The borders here are easily breached, as shown by the massacre in Bwindi last year of eight western tourists by Rwandan rebels who walked over the mountains into the park. The previous year, in August, 1998, Rwandan rebels had claimed responsibility for the abduction of three other westerners on a gorilla tracking adventure in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They were never found and are believed to have been killed.
Now, the gorilla populations show signs of slowly increasing, but the region's political problems raise fears the habitat will become smaller and threaten the species. "Right now we have about 300 gorillas in an area of 300 square kilometers," or about 186 square miles, Tusime said. "If the population continues to multiply, in some 20 or 30 years to come, I think there might not be enough room for them."
There already are signs of possible inbreeding among gorillas in Rwanda, such as webbed toes and crossed eyes, Williamson said. The park there, which is home to about 300 gorillas, lost about 22,000 acres-nearly half its total size-in the 1960s, when the land was set aside for agricultural purposes. It faced the prospect of losing another 5 percent chunk of space this year to accommodate human population demands, but a commission set up to investigate the situation decided against cutting into the park. Still, the pressures remain.
Rwanda is roughly the size of Maryland but with about 3 million more people and one of the world's highest birth rates. While environmentalists view population control as one of the keys to preserving Africa's wilderness from human encroachment, this isn't a subject that can be broached in a country that experienced a genocide of at least half a million.
"Because of the genocide, they think, 'Why should we control the population?' Before the genocide there were several family planning programs, but that's not something we can tackle for the time being," explained one environmentalist, who says birth control is such a delicate subject in Rwanda that one cannot even publicly discuss it.
As long as it remains taboo, pressures will grow to give more of the park away to the people. "If one small bit is given away, then every other community will start claiming they're owed a part," the environmentalist said. "It would be such a short-term gain and such a long-term loss."
November 27, 2000
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / A LAND STRIPPED BARE / FORESTS AND INHABITANTS ON THE DECLINE
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Kigoma, Tanzania - Emmanuel Mtiti closes his eyes and dreams of green, the deep, dark, rich green that swallowed the mountains where he played as a child 30 years ago and concealed the villages of western Tanzania beneath impenetrable clouds of leaves.
"That's my vision. When I close my eyes I see Gombe town in the middle of the hills, and all the hills are forested," Mtiti said. "I see all the houses under the trees. That's what I see."
Then he opens his eyes, and the view is not nearly as idyllic. The hills are brown, and there are few trees to hide the sprawl of rooftops that is spreading rapidly inland from the baboon-lined shores and crystalline waters of Lake Tanganyika.
When a young Englishwoman named Jane Goodall landed 40 years ago to study the mysterious chimpanzees living in the dense forests of Gombe Stream National Park, 15 miles across the lake from the bustle of Kigoma, greenery covered all of the mountains and stretched east toward the Indian Ocean and north into Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.
Like forests across Africa, though, those here are falling victim to des- peration, greed and exploding human populations who hack down the trees for firewood and building material. Tanzania is estimated to be losing about 2 percent of its forestland annually, one of the worst rates of defores- tation on a continent that is losing its woods faster than any other.
The huge tropical forest that once stretched from Africa's steamy west coast to the Indian Ocean has been largely obliterated by logging and human encroachment. The Congo Basin forest, which covers 1.24 million square miles in central Africa, represents 70 percent of Africa's remaining rain forest, but only 7 percent of it is under any form of government- enforced environmental protection. The countries that share it each have lost anywhere from 70 percent to 90 percent of their virgin forests, and the millions of dollars being made from international logging companies operating throughout the basin make it unlikely the destruction will stop.
"I personally think it's a tragedy. It is one of the biggest crimes the world can commit against its biological heritage, that we're the last generation to be able to see untouched forest," said Steve Gartlan of the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Yaounde, the capital of the central African state of Cameroon, where an estimated 90 percent of virgin forests have been cut down.
While the loss of forests and the animal life in them is tragic, the threat to human life is more ominous. A United Nations-World Bank study last year estimated that Africa would be unable to feed two-thirds of its people by the year 2025 because of soil degradation resulting from the slashing, burning and hacking away of forests without replanting or fertilizing-a common practice throughout Africa. Already, the number of chronically malnourished Africans, 200 million, is double what it was 30 years ago.
All it would take is a few years of drought to create a dust bowl effect in vast parts of Africa, similar to that which devastated the U.S. Southern Plains in the 1930s, environmentalists warn.
"The low fertility of African soils is the single most critical impediment to the region's economic development," one of the study's researchers, Hans van Ginkel, said. "We cannot begin to make real progress in the battle against poverty and malnutrition in Africa until the problem of degraded soil is addressed."
That seems almost an insurmountable task at this time in this part of the world, where old customs and new dilemmas are driving people to destroy the increasingly fragile landscape in a daily battle for survival. This is a place where families measure their wealth by the number of children they have, and where each additional child means that much more wood is needed to build a bigger house or to stoke a bigger cooking fire.
"My own sister has 10 children," said Mtiti, who is caught in the middle as he tries to respect his people's age-old customs while also working as co-director of Tacare, a program that aims to reverse deforestation by encouraging such alien concepts as family planning and reseeding. "I tried to persuade my sister. I said, 'Please, try to understand!' But we have to face it. People value children very much. What people say is they want to have many children, in case some die."
This is a place where if a man and woman have 10 children, they assume five will die of malaria, measles, diarrhea, or any of the countless other diseases common to the region. It's a place where each flare-up in neighboring civil wars sends thousands of people pouring across the border into peaceful Tanzania, where they immediately chop down trees for fuel and housing. It's a place where people believe that God, not a family's financial situation, determines whether a child goes to school, and where the forests are thought to tell the future.
"People believe you can determine your life span by burning forest. If you set a fire and it burns long, it means you will live long. If it burns for a short while, it means your days are short," Mtiti said. "All the hills I used to walk in as a child, they're now either bare or farms or villages. It used to be the hills were all covered with forest. You couldn't even see the hilltops. There were monkeys and chimpanzees. They were all over. Now, nothing."
To appreciate the magnitude of the deforestation, you must hike straight uphill for three to four hours, starting before sunrise at the beach at Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park to reach the uppermost ridge before the afternoon thunderstorms roar in. At the top, a small rusted sign marks the border to the park, which was proclaimed in 1968. From here, the views to the east and to the west are breathtaking, not only for their breadth but for the stark contrasts.
To one side are hills covered in foliage, with no sign of human habitation. The only sounds are the rustling of leaves and cries of apes as they swing through the trees, which occasionally vanish into clouds of fog floating in from the lake. To a newcomer leaving Kigoma for Gombe park's pristine isolation, this looks like heaven. But the green is deceiving as it tumbles like a velvety blanket across the hills, dipping in lush creases and folds that roll north to the Burundian border and plunge toward Lake Tanganyika's clear, cold water.
To the other side, just about 100 feet from where the park begins, it is as if someone has skinned the land. Mountains stretching to the horizon are no longer green but covered in square brown patches, with clouds of smoke puffing silently from cooking fires of countless mud huts clinging to the steep slopes. Each square represents a piece of lost forest where people have cleared the trees to plant crops. However, after two or three years of farming without fertilizer and without contouring the crops on these hills, the soil becomes leeched of nutrients. Harvests diminish, and the people abandon their patches and move to another piece of forest, a process repeated millions of times across Africa.
"From a boat, you see these green hills and you say, 'Good God, this is paradise,'" said Anthony Collins, a primate researcher in Gombe and one of a few human residents in a park teeming with chimpanzees, baboons and other wildlife. "But that only goes as far as the top of the hills. As soon as you get to the top, you hear children playing and goats crying. You see wood burning. Then you turn around and say, 'Good God, Gombe is really small!'"
It is really small-about 25 square miles-and battling an ever-increasing wave of humanity just to maintain that minuscule size. Each time violence erupts in neighboring Burundi, whose hills are visible from Gombe, refugees pour across the border and begin living off Tanzania's scorched land. War- weary refugees row across the lake from the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, and disappear into the hills, where they are welcomed by other refugees. They prefer to set up housekeeping on their own rather than enter one of the teeming camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but that means using the lake for water and the forest for food and wood.
"The decline in chimps has coincided with the increase of refugees," Collins said, noting an estimated loss of about 35 chimps in Gombe's southern region between 1995 and 1998, at the height of the region's refugee crisis. "The good soil is where the best chimp food is, so that's the area they cut down. It's just competition between chimps and people for the prime resources, and the people are always going to win." Throughout the park, where there were 150 chimps in the 1980s, there are now believed to be 80 to 100, and there are fewer than 200,000 across the continent, compared with about 2 million in 1900.
In addition to driving the chimps and other animals from their natural habitats into areas unsuitable for their long-term survival, humans can pass on potentially fatal diseases to them, such as pneumonia and measles. In February, two chimps died in Gombe from an outbreak of a respiratory ailment. While the cause of the sickness is not known, researchers suspected it was passed on by humans, and imposed new rules requiring people to maintain a distance of at least 15 feet from the animals. Another eight chimps died in 1996 from a respiratory illness, and 11 died in 1987 of the same type of ailment.
In the mountains of Rwanda, made famous by Dian Fossey's research into the mountain gorillas, four of the apes died in 1990 after an outbreak of bronchopneumonia believed to have been spread by tourists making the long hike into the hills for a glimpse of the huge animals.
While images of furry, humanlike animals under threat of extinction might grab the attention of foreigners, it is difficult to get across the message to locals living in these desperately poor corners of the Earth, where people have little choice but to farm on whatever land is unoccupied and hunt the animals either to sell or to eat.
"I cannot expect someone living in a remote place with nothing, nothing, nothing to suddenly start supporting conservation," said Roger Fotso of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is headquartered at the Bronx Zoo and operates several projects in central Africa aimed at stopping deforestation and stemming the bush-meat business. "I'll drive into a village and say, 'Please don't kill my elephants, please don't kill my gorillas, please don't chop down my rare trees,' and they say, 'Fine, what are you going to do for us?'" said Fotso, a Cameroonian who spends most of his time trying to change people's habits. "They don't have schools, they don't have medical facilities. They're remote and completely isolated. At the end of the day, we're showing up and talking, but we have nothing to offer."
Although there are laws against hunting and cutting down trees in Gombe park, they are nearly impossible to enforce, says Steven Enos, a teacher at a primary school in the village of Chankele, which is hidden in the hills adjacent to Gombe. In recent years, the curriculum has been extended to include tree-planting and other forest-saving lessons. "The government is very, very restrictive about hunting, and if they eat wild animals, they must do it in secret," Enos said, acknowledging that locals resort to eating bush meat and taking wood illegally.
Getting anyone to admit to it is another story. Locals like Fadhili Kimambo, who grew up in these hills and now works as a guide in Gombe, blame refugees from other countries for the forest incursions. "I can say that many people are still primitive," he said of them. "They are the first to come into the park and cut the trees for building materials."
But locals aren't blameless. The muddy roads that meander through villages outside Gombe are lined with women carrying stacks of firewood on their heads. "We need to cook," one woman said simply.
It is even more difficult to make headway in countries where governments appear more interested in reaping the benefits from international logging concessions than saving the forests for future generations. In the 1980s, more than 64,000 square miles of forestland-an area nearly as big as Washington State-were cut down in the Congo Basin, said a 1998 report by Britain's World Society for the Protection of Animals. Despite increased pressure by environmentalists, governments in the region "remain disinterested in conservation and environmental matters in west and central Africa-a basic disregard that pervades all levels," the report said.
A summit last year of regional leaders in Cameroon, ostensibly to come up with ways of protecting the forests, failed to declare any new protected forest areas and even ended with a declaration that mentioned the need to "promote and increase the pace of industrialization" in the forest sector. This isn't surprising, given the amount of money logging earns for the region's cash-strapped governments. Cameroon's earnings from wood exports, for example, rose from $ 141 million to $ 231 million between 1989 and 1991. From 1992 to 1996, its timber exports doubled.
The mainly European and Asian companies that hold concessions throughout the Congo Basin's forests-concessions that allow them to clear vast tracts and then ship the logs overseas-are supposed to abide by international guidelines setting, for example, minimum sizes of trees to be felled. But rarely are these rules followed or enforced, said a British employee of a European logging firm in Cameroon who manages one of his company's sawmills in Yaounde and sees firsthand the abuse. He refused to be identified for fear of retribution.
"The first thing I noticed was the diameter of logs coming into my sawmill. I knew they couldn't be legal," he said, explaining how easy it is to get such logs past the roadblocks manned by forestry officials on the routes into town. "If you're paid 40,000 CFA about $ 80 in the local currency, Central African Franc a month to check logging trucks and someone slips you a 10,000 $ 20 note to let a few trucks pass unchecked, you're going to take it."
Major companies, including his own, habitually pay huge bribes to government officials to avoid being fined for exceeding the boundaries of their concession areas and exporting undersized logs. "Just to get to see a cabinet minister, the director of a logging company would not bring less than 2 million CFA about $ 4,000 ," he said.
Vincent Mfomfou, a spokesman for the Ministry of Environment and Forests, acknowledges the problems and says only outside pressure on all countries, not just Cameroon, will have an effect. "There is also a need for regional cooperation," he said. "You cannot control poaching and illegal logging at this end if they're doing the same thing across the border in Nigeria, because then people will just go over there and do it, and the end result will be the same-destruction of the forests."
There have been some signs of better enforcement in Cameroon, at least. The sawmill manager's company was fined in March 40 million CFA about $ 80,000 for illegal practices, including cutting down undersized trees. "I think what the government has done against companies like mine is a really positive step, " said the employee, who said logging companies in parts of South America, where he once worked, are required by law to take measures that should be enforced in Africa. For example, after clearing an area, the companies plant seedlings to regenerate the forest, and destroy roads and bridges leading to the area to ensure the land remains untouched. No such precautions are taken in Africa. "It's depressing, being part of this massive, long-term destruction effort," said the mill manager, who hopes to find another job outside the logging industry by the end of the year.
In Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, ecotourism-albeit in tiny patches of forest-is helping to save the forests and the animals. Visitors pay anywhere from $ 100 to $ 250 to enter parks such as Gombe, or Bwindi in Uganda, to go on guided treks in search of chimpanzees and gorillas. That's unlikely to happen in central Africa, however, where the inhospitable climate-high heat and humidity almost year-round and torrential rainy seasons-and lack of tourist facilities make the forests untenable to most visitors.
The biggest problem may be changing the mind-set of locals, who were raised to live off the land and who rank environmental concerns far below other issues. Mtiti discovered this in 1994 when Tacare was launched and decided to survey local villages to find out their most pressing needs. The responses were a wake-up call.
"Deforestation was our No. 1 problem, but their No. 6 problem," behind health, education and other social issues, Mtiti said.
"What it showed to us was ignorance of the environment. They thought God created the environment and that it's perfect all the time, and that even if we destroy it, it will be perfect."
November 26, 2000
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / AFRICA'S GREAT DIVIDE / A CONTINENT OF NATURAL WONDERS IS FAILING IN ITS STRUGGLE TO BALANCE NEEDS OF HUMANS, ENVIRONMENT
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Gudigwa, Botswana-The torrential rains early this year brought abundant blooms of wild fruits and berries, fervent swarms of honeybees and hopes of a bountiful year for the traditional hunters and gatherers who depend upon nature's fickle moods to survive.It's a way of life that has sustained Tsima Thamaga and Gudigwa's 800 residents for generations, but it is one they now fear is under threat from an unlikely source: cows, the backbone of modern Botswana's lucrative agricultural industry. More precisely, from a 5-foot-tall, heavy-cable fence that was erected without warning near their village to protect cattle from mixing with wild animals, which can pass on diseases such as foot-and-mouth, potentially fatal to the country's livestock industry. But it also has cut off the Basarwa-as the bushmen are called here-from their traditional lands of plenty.
This year's extraordinary rains highlighted the problem, says Thamaga, 68, lamenting over the bounty that went uncollected on the far side of the fence. "As you know, we are gatherers. We gather wild berries, water lily fruits and even grass," the deeply wrinkled village elder explained, pushing his wooden walking stick into the fine white sand that blankets the ground and swirls in tiny whirlwinds on the hot winds that buffet the village. "We get them on the other side of the fence, but because of the presence of the fence, we can no longer do that."
"Also, this fence disturbs the animals," added Merafe Gabasaleteng, 60. "They spend all their time wandering along the fence looking for a place to cross to get to more grazing land. Kudus and antelopes, which like jumping, sometimes they don't make it and fall on the fences."
The dilemma being played out across the isolated reaches of northern Botswana, an area known as Ngamiland, is one being faced by countries throughout the continent as they enter the 21st Century. They want to fire up their economies, become globally competitive and accommodate exploding human populations, but fear destroying the wilderness, the animals and the ways of life that are unique to Africa.
From the sodden rain forests of western Africa to the smoke-belching industrial centers of South Africa, from the crystalline lakes of central Africa to the rolling, velvet-green hills of eastern Africa, the environment is being pounded by the conflicting demands of ancient ways vs. modern needs. At the heart lies poverty, the man-made plague of Africa, which drives governments and individuals to chip away at many of the natural resources that are their means of survival.
In Cameroon, where the timber trade has wiped out 90 percent of virgin woodlands, traditional hunters who once killed animals only to feed their families have become profiteers in the booming bush-meat business, which is fueled by the logging industry's incursions into the forests and which is moving dozens of species of animals closer to extinction. On the placid shores of Lake Victoria, ever-increasing numbers of fishermen push off in wooden canoes each night and cast their nets, competing for shrinking supplies of fish and resorting to desperate means-even poisoning the water-to increase their catches.
On the savannas of southern and eastern Africa, subsistence farmers battle with thriving herds of elephants that fuel the burgeoning ecotourism industry but also pummel crops and tear down trees. The wars in central Africa send hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing across borders, where they unwittingly cause irreparable damage by cultivating every square acre of soil and cutting down the dwindling supplies of trees to meet basic human needs for warmth and shelter.
High rates of cancer spring up in South Africa's industrial areas, where decades of government neglect allowed big industries to pump toxic clouds into the air. And in Botswana, people like Thamaga fear that they and the wild animals are being squeezed out of their habitats and ways of life as the government bends over backward to accommodate its cattle industry, the No. 3 money-earner after diamonds and tourism.
"This is the picture at the beginning of this century. If we don't act now, the future... is very, very grim," said primate researcher Jane Goodall, who in July marked the 40th anniversary of her arrival in Africa with a somber assessment of the continent's environment. "Don't you think the same brains that have taken us to the moon can figure out a way to live in harmony with nature?"
It's not that they aren't trying. Across Africa, individuals and organizations are trying to achieve the right balance, but they are up against overwhelming obstacles: overpopulation and poverty that are sapping natural resources; political and economic problems that take precedence in most countries over conservation issues; and resentment among Africans toward western attempts to limit their use of the environment-an environment whose destruction began under colonial rule and whose continued destruction is linked to western demands for the products Africa offers, such as exotic wood for furniture, ivory for jewels and ornaments, and wild animals to be shot and stuffed as trophies.
"Africa is not living its own way anymore. The whole thing changed with colonization. Why is the ivory trade such a problem today? Because there's an international market for it. Same with the trade in the African gray parrot. People here don't buy those things," said Roger Fotso, a Cameroonian working with the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society to save the forests of central Africa. "But you can't just go into Africa now and tell people to stop doing that. They've been frustrated for so long, and they say, 'How can you prefer animals to people?' You can understand that to an extent. There are people who do not understand how you can invest resources into saving animals and trees when you can't give them water in a pump."
Since the early 1900s, Africa has been in an environmental free-fall as hunting and the milking of its natural resources have gone largely unhindered. In 1909, says South African conservationist Gareth Patterson, Theodore Roosevelt and his son killed 512 animals during a safari that set out from Nairobi, and whose catch included 17 lions and 11 elephants. By the mid-1980s, the unrestricted killing of animals and destruction of their habitats had placed elephants as well as several other animals, including gorillas, roan antelopes, wild dogs and chimpanzees in danger of extinction.
"Everything has its niche. Everything is the link of a chain, and every time you lose one of those links, you just don't know when it is going to unravel," Patterson said. "The scary thing is we've lost so much, and there's so little left."
Although elephant populations have increased as a result of being put on the list of endangered species, other species continue to be decimated. More than 70 in Africa, ranging from the largest mammals to reptiles such as pythons, are considered by environmentalists as under various degrees of threat, and several, including gorillas and rhinos, verge on extinction.
But the reason is no longer poaching and hunting so much as destruction of their habitats, a result of booming human needs and the rush by African countries to profit from big industries such as cattle and logging, say environmentalists. It is the dispute over land use as exemplified in Botswana's fence conflict.
"The big problem is what is going to happen in the future," said Karen Ross of Conservation International in Maun, Botswana, a hot and dusty desert town of tourist hotels, camping outfitters and curio shops that serves as the jumping-off point for visitors to the Okavango Delta wilderness area. With cattle fences now erected in parts of the delta region, Ross says the region's wildlife areas are becoming smaller and smaller, threatening the delta's biodiversity and, ultimately, Botswana's tourist industry. Ross emphasizes that most environmentalists do not object to the cattle industry, only to what they consider the inordinate amount of space being set aside for livestock at the expense of wildlife.
"It worries us that the Okavango Delta, which used to be this pristine wetland, this jewel of Botswana's tourist industry, has in the last four years been crisscrossed by fences. But it's not just fences that are a concern. It's the change in land use. It's huge blocks of land being set aside just for cattle within the fenced areas. The areas left over then become too small to sustain the wildlife," she said, because they greatly reduce the availability of land for wildlife as well as hindering animals' movements.
Botswana's government first began erecting veterinary cordon fences, as they are called, through wilderness areas in the 1960s to meet European import requirements to keep disease-carrying wild animals out of contact with cattle. The incentives were strong: better prices paid by the European Union for beef from Botswana, a fledgling, landlocked, sparsely populated country the size of France with a dry, hostile environment that was ranked one of the world's 20 poorest nations.
If it weren't for a severe drought in the early 1980s, the fences' impact on wildlife might have gone unnoticed. Instead, says Ross, about 50,000 wildebeests in the parched central Kalahari Desert began heading north toward the Buteti River, their usual migratory route toward water, only to find themselves blocked by the Kuke fence. Too weary from thirst and hunger to find an alternate route around the long fence, they died there. Since then, more fences have been put up, including those in Ngamiland, which are of the greatest concern to environmentalists and locals. Ngamiland includes Seronga, a delta village two hours down a rough road from Gudigwa that is the starting point for travelers eager to get far, far off the beaten track.
Dawn breaks softly in this part of the delta, where the sun's first rays cast a golden glow across the still waters, and nothing seems to move except a few wooden canoes silently skimming the surface through curtains of tall, shimmering reeds. Sareqo Sakega has been plying these swamps for 32 years, steering long boats carved from knotty tree trunks through the narrow waterways with a 9-foot pole that he pushes repeatedly into the delta's muddy floor to transport himself along.
Though backbreaking work, it is the best way to make a living in Botswana's arid, isolated northern reaches. Since the fences went up, though, things have changed for polers like Sakega, who live off income from tourists they transport into the watery wilderness, far from the world of phones, televisions and other trappings of modern life.
"When you're poling tourists, they want to see animals, but there's no gate to get through the fence to show them these animals," Sakega, 72, said one crisp morning as he prepared his canoe-known as a mokoro-to carry a pair of visitors off toward the crimson-tinged horizon. "There's a very big difference since the fence went up. In the past there was lots of game, but in the past few years since the fence went up animals are on the other side, and when a lot of them try to jump over the fence, they miss, and it's the end of their lives."
This is an area often described as one of Africa's last wilderness outposts, where the Okavango River flows down from Angola and spreads like a giant hand across the grassy landscape into a series of sparkling channels that form the delta. It is an area of grazing herds of elephants, giraffes, zebras and antelopes that migrate toward the water during each dry season, and of tiny villages of mud-and-stick huts like Gudigwa, which are linked by roads of soft sand that swallow a car's tires like quicksand and are passable only with a heavy-duty 4x4, on foot or on the back of a donkey.
"If it stays the way it is now, the wildlife areas surrounding the delta will continue to decline," said Arthur Anderson, an environmental consultant who has done an exhaustive study of the fences' impact and concluded, from aerial and other surveys, that populations of large animals declined within five years in all areas where fences went up. His report includes photographs of carcasses of animals lying beside fences where they became blocked in their efforts to reach water, or carcasses of those that became entangled in fences that they tried to climb or jump. "Eventually, it will get to the stage where the only thing you can have is cattle," he said.
The problem is particularly acute for animals such as zebras and buffalo, which migrate each year toward water and whose paths are affected by the fences, which were erected hastily and without environmental-impact studies to prevent catastrophes such as the Kuke fence pileup.
The Botswana government, which did not respond to several requests for comment, last year commissioned for the first time a study to look at the impact the fences are having on the environment. When the results are released, they are expected to recommend moving or removing at least some of the fences. "These fences were put up in an emergency to stop the spread of cattle lung disease, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't have been more detailed planning," said one of the scientists involved in the study. "I think with a much more sensitive approach, you could have put up fences with much less impact."
Most of the fences around the delta were put up in 1996 and '97 to prevent the spread of a cattle lung disease, which is believed to have entered the country via neighboring Namibia to the west and which forced the Botswana government to slaughter more than 300,000 head of cattle in 1996-the entire Ngamiland herd. The fences here include a portion of the northern Buffalo fence, which begins a few miles southeast of Seronga in the delta waters and runs in a wide loop up to the northeast, where it hooks up with another fence running along the Caprivi Strip that separates Botswana and Angola. Within that loop is land deemed set aside for cattle, where wild animals are not supposed to be. But this is an important boundary area where wildlife such as buffalo and elephants would normally move between the northern delta region and Namibia.
You don't have to sit in a mokoro to see the fences, which are about 5 feet tall and consist of five heavy, galvanized steel cables less than a foot apart linked to thick, round wooden posts spaced just several feet apart. They cross the straight, two-lane highway that leads from Ngamiland south to the town of Maun, and at each crossing spot, wildlife officials check vehicles for prohibited animals before opening the gates to let them pass. "It's just like East and West Germany," Sakega grumbled, saying that in remote regions where there are no paved roads or cars, extended families have been separated by the hasty erection of the fences and are forced to hike several miles to find a proper gate that they can go through to visit each other.
Worse, he says, the fence cuts through the water and limits the distance polers can carry tourists, hence limiting the area's desirability as a vacation destination and hampering the ability of people like him to earn a living. He and his fellow polers, who gather early each morning at the waterfront mokoro camp to prepare their boats for tourists, offer a simple solution: Either take down the fences in this region, or move them farther away to give more land to the wildlife and to the indigenous people.
While Sakega and his fellow polers view the issue in relatively simple terms, there are those on the other side of the fence, both literally and figuratively. Modern Africa, with its burgeoning populations and its need to dig itself out of its economic desperation, needs to be managed like a gigantic Disneyland, with different areas reserved for different uses, they say. In Botswana, where 75 percent of the beef is exported to the EU, that means setting aside large areas for cattle ranching and preserving other areas to create the image of pristine wilderness that tourists pay to see.
"There is no Eden anymore. There are just places that look like Eden that have to be managed so that people who come from New Jersey think it's still Eden," said one of Botswana's biggest cattle ranchers, who did not want to be identified by name for fear of angering wildlife organizations, which form a powerful lobby in southern Africa. "It's all about balancing the resources of a country and preserving its value. It's about managing a theme park."
John Ledger of the Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa, which advocates practices such as culling to control wild-animal populations, agrees, albeit in less crude terms. "Cattle has been one of the great tragedies and disasters of this continent," said Ledger, blaming the Botswana fences for animal deaths, but he adds that the livestock industry has become too important a source of income and way of life to simply wipe out in favor of game farming. "There's a dichotomy. We like the idea of using Africa's ecosystems to provide goods and products for humans, but we also want it to remain this untouched wilderness. The fact of the matter, though, is there's nowhere on the planet that is untouched by man anymore."
In the rancher's imaginary Disneyland, Gudigwa would fall somewhere in Nowhere Land. This community, a harrowing two-hour drive from Seronga along a winding road of fine, slippery sand that resembles ice to drive upon, has no electricity, no pavement and nothing remotely resembling a market. A few years ago the landscape changed when the northern Buffalo fence was erected through the region.
Suddenly, says Thamaga, the plants on the far side of the fence were off-limits. "We were told that we'd be able to just go through the fence and collect whatever we needed, but now we're told if we go to the other side, we'll be considered poachers."
Just on the edge of Gudigwa is a military encampment whose soldiers are responsible for ensuring the fence is not damaged and keeping poachers from clambering over it and killing the wildlife. Occasionally animals are found dead along the fence, admits Onalenna Mosifava, one of the people responsible for patrolling it, but without the barrier, he says it would be too easy for poachers from war-torn Angola, only about 50 miles away, to hunt the wildlife and for herdsmen to bring potentially sick livestock into Botswana. "You have to think of the country's economy," he said, summing up what could be the theme of every African government at odds with environmentalists.
Ironically, and despite the battle raging in Botswana, fences probably are the ultimate answer, says one of Africa's leading conservationists, paleontologist Richard Leakey, whose years at the helm of Kenya's Wildlife Service are credited with stemming rampant poaching. During his two often-flamboyant reigns, the last of which ended earlier this year when he was reassigned to head the country's civil service, Leakey imposed shoot-to-kill orders against poachers and staged a huge bonfire in 1989 to burn the country's ivory backlog, which was worth an estimated $ 3 million at the time.
Probably his most controversial legacy, though, is his call for "hard edges," electrified fences and armed guards, to protect national parks and other state-run wilderness areas. "Free-roaming wildlife as we've had in Kenya from eternity is virtually gone," said Leakey, whose critics, such as Ledger, say culling and controlled hunting are preferable to enable humans and nature to co-exist. Leakey disagrees, arguing that desperate people will always resort to measures that are harmful to the environment, such as chopping down trees for wood and hunting animals to sell their meat.
"Environment is more important than wildlife. If you lose the environment, you'll lose the wildlife too," said Leakey, who argues that attitudes that allow nature to be decimated will eventually lead to destruction of the environmental qualities upon which humans depend: clean water, breathable air and arable soil.
"I think unborn generations have as much right to a healthy planet, a healthy country environmentally, as they do to opportunities for education and employment," Leakey said. "It has to become a universal value, the idea of environmental rights. It has to be changed. It's not going to come overnight, but it's a process that must come."
GRAPHIC: Newsday Photos by Ken Spencer - 1) Hunters and gatherers like Tsima Thamaga, of Gudigwa, Botswana, fear that they, and the country s wild animals, are being squeezed out as the government tries to accommodate its cattle industry. Cattle is the No. 3 money earner after diamonds and tourism. 2) Though Botswana s fences separate cattle from wild animals, Thamaga, foreground, with patroller Onalenna Mosifava, sees the fences as the source of problems, not a solution. 3) Sareqo Sakega, above, and other polers in the Okavango Delta, 4) below, find their work hindered by the fences, which block tourists access to the area s animals, Sakega says. 5) Tangled, barren limbs at Chobe National Park, where elephants have ravaged branches and trunks, killing the park s larger trees and damaging many others.
LOAD-DATE: November 26, 2000
November 26, 2000
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / COLOSSAL MARVELS, HEADACHES / IN SOUTHERN AFRICA, MORE ELEPHANTS MEAN MORE PROBLEMS
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Mabele, Botswana-Esther Tumede holds her large, work-weathered hand at thigh-level, her dried and cracked palm parallel to the dusty ground, and explains the frustrations of trying to farm in the stamping grounds of the world's largest land mammal."When the corn is about this high, the elephants step all over it. But when it gets this high," she said, positioning her hand next to her forehead, " they eat it! I've lost a lot."
So have many residents of Mabele, conveniently, and inconveniently, perched on the banks of the Chobe River, the drawing card for elephant herds that thunder down from the hills of nearby Chobe National Park and straight through this hamlet on their way to drink and bathe. Years ago, when poachers were plundering southern Africa's elephant population, this was a good place to be a farmer like Tumede. The river provided an endless supply of water to the parched land, and the adjacent park, a major tourist attraction, provided jobs.
The water and the park are still there, but residents say the number of elephants has grown so much that living and farming among the mud huts and tiny farm plots has become hazardous. "They eat. They destroy. They really destroy," said the local ambulance driver, Leonard Nkonkwena, who last year had to transport the body of a man who had been stamped to death by an elephant. "That elephant...I don't know what happened. He tried to shoot it, but the elephant used his foot to kick the gun and then stamped him."
In 1988, the number of elephants in Africa was estimated at 600,000, down from 1.3 million a decade before, and many countries had lost anywhere from 80 percent to 95 percent of their herds to hunters profiteering off the international ivory trade. Since a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) treaty signed by most of the world's countries to protect plants and animals banned world trade in elephant products in 1989, elephant numbers have increased-so much so that conservationists say there are too many to live in harmony with other species, including people.
Not only are they trampling farmland, elephants-they spend an average of 18 hours a day grazing-are in danger of literally eating themselves and just about every other animal and plant species that depend on the dwindling habitat into oblivion, said Patrick Simwanza, who grew up in this region and now works as a guide at the Chobe Game Lodge. "What we're looking at is destruction of the environment," said Simwanza as he rolled his Land Rover up to an acacia tree and watched two elephants dig away at the meaty bark with their tusks and wrap their trunks around high, leafy branches to tug them down to their mouths.
There are about 85,000 elephants in Botswana, double the number a decade ago and more than twice what the land is capable of handling, Simwanza said. The situation is similar in other southern African countries, where the ban on ivory trading led to drastic reductions in poaching. The down side, said Simwanza, is the resulting destruction by the hugely powerful and prolific animals, which travel in herds of 25 to 30 and which can double their populations about every 15 years.
"The trees, you can see the damage," he said, pointing out scores of bare, ghostly trees that have died as a result of being repeatedly gored and rubbed by elephants after their bark and leaves.
The situation has led to a contentious debate over whether to kill, or cull, some of the herds and whether to relax elephants' protected status. At last year's CITES convention in Nairobi, Kenya, four countries -Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa-lobbied to relax the ban on trade in elephant products, saying tusks from culled elephants or those that died naturally could be sold and the money poured back into the countries' economies. The request was rejected after opponents said it would lead to a resurgence in poaching.
When South Africa's government last year raised the possibility of culling elephants in its famed Kruger National Park, where it says the elephant population is becoming too big for the environment to sustain, public opposition led by animal-rights groups forced it to quietly drop the subject. Anti-culling groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare argue that in situations where man has already altered the environment, such as in Africa's game parks, meddling might as well be humane rather than involve the killing of excess animals.
"We've interfered so much already. We've moved them here, we've moved them there, we've built fences," said Michele Pickover of IFAW. "Why can't we just put food out for them? What's the difference?"
The difference, say those on the other side, is the damage posed by elephants to other animals and plants, and to people's livelihoods. "If we're truly serious about maintaining biodiversity and preventing extinctions, we have an obligation not to let one animal control the environment," said John Ledger of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, who sees culling as a necessary evil as modern Africa tries to balance human with animal needs. "Elephants are the problem animal of the continent."
They are a problem the people of Mabele grapple with year-round, particularly during the August-to-December dry season, when the huge animals waltz through town to reach the water. Drums used to be the weapon of choice for Mabele's 800 residents, Tumede said. When herds or a single elephant came into town, residents would pound on drums to scare them off. Now, they've become too numerous and bold to be frightened, so people are reduced to sleeping in their fields at night with guns to shoot the animals if they approach.
"There's no way to protect the people and the animals at the same time," said Nkonkwena, who, like most people here, wishes the government would cull the herds and does not share environmental activists' adoration of them.
"I don't like the elephants. All of the people don't like them," Tumede said. "Of course animals have to be protected, but if they reduced the number of elephants, it would allow the people to farm."
Culling advocates acknowledge, though, that they face difficult odds changing the minds of animal-rights activists, most of whom don't live in places like Mabele and don't see the damage and difficulties created by the ballooning elephant numbers.
"Things like Babar the elephant have remained deep in the psyche of people who are living in New York, or London or Paris, or anywhere other than the bush. Elephants to them are on a pedestal-almost human-and it's easy for them to say, 'Don't do this, don't do that,'" Ledger said. "It's much more difficult to say we want to have elephants on this continent for a long, long time, but we also want to preserve ecological biodiversity. That's going to involve killing."
November 26, 2000
NATURE UNDER PRESSURE / CROSS HAIRS OF CONTROVERSY / DOES HUNTING HELP SUSTAIN ENVIRONMENT?
By Tina Susman
Johannesburg, South Africa-In the entryway to Gerhard Damm's home in an exclusive northern suburb, a stuffed cheetah sprawls luxuriantly across a wooden bench. Damm walks slowly through his huge, woodsy living room and gazes proudly at the dozens of stuffed animals he has hunted from Africa to Asia. The walls are literally covered with the heads of wild animals, and full-body trophies stand in the corners, flank the giant stone fireplace, and line the edges of the room like furry sculptures.Waiting to be hung is the latest addition to Damm's still-life zoo, the boulder-sized head of a Cape buffalo, which has tilted forward and come to rest on its giant nose in the middle of the floor.
"For me, when I look around my room, the ones that are dearest to my heart are the ones I had to work hardest for," Damm said, singling out a stone ram from northern British Columbia that took days to track and shoot.
As the Africa director of Safari Club International, a global, 35,000-member-strong organization of hunters, Damm might not come across as an environmentalist, but he considers hunters among the best friends this continent's beleaguered environment has.
SCI, along with several wildlife groups such as the Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa, is a supporter of the concept of sustainable utilization, a contentious issue that essentially involves selling the planet's natural resources for profit in an effort to save them.
Sustainable utilization, which includes culling and hunting, is perhaps the most divisive issue facing wildlife and environmental groups as they battle over how best to balance human and wildlife needs. Animal-rights activists say it promotes a sadistic attitude toward the environment, an attitude that led to many animals nearly becoming extinct in the early 20th Century.
"What is sustainable? If demand continues to grow, how do you sustain it? It's such an airy-fairy concept," said Michele Pickover of the local International Fund for Animal Welfare, which says opening up the environment to profiteers will encourage people to milk it dry.
Their detractors say they are missing the big picture, which is the need for Africa's people to survive and to be allowed to make money, from hunting or other means, off of an environment that for decades was the sole domain of white colonialists.
"It's very easy to sit in New York or Berlin and say you want to save animals, but the people have to eat, and they can't go to the supermarket. If a foreign hunter comes in, he pays a fee, and part of that money will remain in the area. And the hunting operations create some employment," Damm said. The foreign hunting industry, according to SCI, creates tens of thousands of jobs and generates $ 40 million a year.
In neighboring Zimbabwe, the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources, known as Campfire, claims to generate about $ 2.5 million a year for three dozen district councils representing communities on safari land. Foreign safari operators pay those communities for the right to bring tourists in, and more than 90 percent of the money generated comes from hunting.
"It kills elephants, but there isn't any other option," said one of Campfire's directors, Ivan Bond. "If that wildlife wasn't generating revenue and incentives, it wouldn't be there."
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