67 Wild Animals, Where are They?
The Mozambique government wants to cash in on the kind of tourism that the South Africans have with Kruger National Park. Kruger is probably the foremost wild animal park in the world where you are guaranteed to see lions, elephants, buffalo etc. Limpopo Park abuts up against Kruger on the Mozambique side of the boundary, and the South Africans have been donating hundreds of different surplus wild animals. But after three days in Limpopo Park, we saw only a few impalas, 3 kudus and a waterbuck. What happened to the other donated animals?
Waterbuck in Limpopo Park, Mozambique. Photo by Rick Bein 2005.
The 26 thousand tribal villagers who still live in Limpopo Park have not had much say about all these animals being released in their back yards, have gone to great extremes to protect themselves, their cattle, and their crops. After the lions ate a few cows and the elephants trashed a few fields, they were shot dead, and the rest of the wild animals have fled back into Kruger Park. Now the villagers have established who is at the top of the food chain, while acting in collusion with poachers. The government can’t understand why the tourists aren’t flocking in to spend the big bucks!
Farmstead in Southern Mozambique. Raised corn crib is a prime target for elephants. Photo by Rick Bein 2005.
Against this backdrop of four different stake holders: 1) the animal park managers, 2) Western donor agencies, 3) Mozambique government and 4) the local villagers a much more complex situation is apparent. The objective of a National Park is primarily to provide area where nature can exist, protected from the over exploitation of human activity. It is the current view that there is an inherent advantage in maintaining natural areas to promote biodiversity as well as to support educational, recreational, and scientific research based on the continuous presence of wildlife species. The cost of providing natural areas may be provided through a number of scenarios. Governments frequently finance the maintenance of such parks, but under some circumstance’s parks are maintained by their recreational users. I have seen plenty of instances in which recreational users are charged very high fees which are not put back into the parks!
