WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT IN AN ‘OUTPOST OF TYRANNY’
BRIAN GRATWICKE AND BRENT STAPELKAMP
ZIMCONSERVATION
Environmental problems
Through our research, we sought to identify the main environmental problems afflicting Zimbabwe, listed in degree of importance. None these problems are new to Zimbabwe and some very comprehensive baseline studies prior to the recent political upheaval exist for many of these problems. This paper does not aim to provide detailed historical accounts, but weaves together some of the most recent available reports to provide an overview and some context to the environmental challenges facing Zimbabwe.
1) Poaching - The illegal killing and consumption of Zimbabwe’s animal species continues to pose the most serious threat to the future sustainability of the country’s wildlife reserves and game farming activities. The lack of property rights (especially now that land has been nationalized) is a key factor compounding the loss of wild animal populations. The Parks & Wild Life Act of 1975 was an extraordinarily progressive piece of legislation and unique – certainly in Africa and perhaps elsewhere – in that wildlife became the property of the landowner, apart from a few specially protected species. However, now that land ownership is very insecure, wildlife is simply viewed by some new landowners as an asset to be stripped from the land before it is re-confiscated. Lack of reporting, lawlessness, and impunity are contributing to the unheard extermination of wildlife populations.
Three major types of poaching pervade in Zimbabwe today: Subsistence, Sport, and Commercial. Subsistence poaching reflects an opportunistic response to the combination of poverty, lack of food, and the disintegrating economy and rule of law in country. Many independent news reports affirm that thousands of rural poor cut through wire fences on conservancies and commercial farms, then use this wire to make snares to catch wild animals for food both on private land and in the bush [1, 2] (Fig 1).
Similar circumstances of poverty and desperation have led to the utter depletion of wildlife in other Sub-Saharan African countries. Illegal sport hunters, most of which are visitors from South Africa, have been quick to take advantage of the breakdown in rule of law to seek the thrill of the kill or simply to harvest venison for “biltong” (a dried meat delicacy) or hides (especially zebra hides) that are then smuggled into South Africa for commercial trade [3]. Impunity and the lack of regulation have given Zimbabwe a reputation among such undesirable tourists, and they are likely to continue exploiting the shambles that the government has created around property rights. Commercial poaching outfits usually operate for profit in the form of bush meat and/or trophies [1, 4-7]. Such outfits tend to be politically connected and therefore allowed access to once-protected areas, and there are several reports indicating that unscrupulous South-African based safari-hunting operations are bringing ignorant or uncaring clients in to shoot trophies in unregulated situations such as game farms from which previous owners have been evicted. In connection to this rapidly evolving business venture, one hears occasional reports of “self-pillaging” by the government, including the worrying development that uniformed officials from the government and military are poaching animals in parks and on conservancies. One such case reported that army helicopters were used to transport antelope carcasses [1, 5, 8, 9], while in another incident, landmines were used to kill hippos.
These poaching reports have been fairly widespread across the game rich areas of the country in the northwest, southwest and southeast, and have concentrated on former game farms, conservancies and commercial farms. Poaching of former wildlife conservancies is much more extensive than the isolated reports from the National parks, and this was originally fuelled by the breakdown of law-and-order associated with President Mugabe’s land-reform program. Some senior government officials have actively advocated disruptions and poaching on land that was formerly privately owned as spoils of war [11, 12].
Another alarming development is incidents of poaching in national park areas and across national borders [10]. This indicates a break down in the rule of law, and a reduction in the quality of management of core protected areas, that would normally be a potential conservation safety net to re-stock formerly privately owned lands if and when the current land dispute is resolved. Efforts to curb poaching incidents in national parks are hindered by the constant lack of resources and on occasions, direct interference by the State [13].
Accurate monitoring of the poachers’ toll is impossible. Wildlife researchers and law enforcement are now barred from going into many former game farms and safari concessions, making any systematic appraisal impossible under the current regime. These areas often abut National parks and it is likely that they represent wildlife sinks for animals that move beyond National Park boundaries [7, 8, 14]. A few well-documented cases offer a tip-of-the-iceberg view of the situation. For example, two years ago, there were sixteen black rhinos killed in Matusadonna and Hwange National Parks [15]. In light of such developments, 30 rhinos were recently re-located from high-risk game-farms to safer, more protected areas. In 2003 it is estimated that 1 in 10 of Zimbabwe’s 550 black rhinos has been lost to poachers and illegal safari hunters between and 2000-2003 [1, 15, 17]. Another high-profile case is that of the painted hunting dog where over one 18-month period, three out of five study packs of painted hunting dogs were lost to poacher’s snares [2, 18, 19].
On the demand side of the equation, the international market for illegal wildlife products is probably increasing and Zimbabwe’s warm relations with China poses a worrying development in this regard [20, 21]. China’s rising place in the global economy, along with its insatiable taste for wildlife products—mostly in connection with traditional Chinese medicine—pose a huge threat to endangered species worldwide [17, 22]. Zimbabwe appears to be emerging as a new focus of supply and a group of Chinese nationals was recently arrested in Zimbabwe with 67 illegally procured elephant tusks [23]. The situation clearly demands closer international monitoring.
2) Deforestation and Overgrazing - Prior to the year 2000, meticulous documentation highlighted that deforestation was a major problem in Zimbabwe. Forest cover declined from 57% in 1990 to 49% in 2000, and 44% in 2005, a rate of loss over six times higher than the global average [24].25? In 2000, communal lands held an average of 6.3t of indigenous wood stock per hectare, while privately owned land held three times as much, 20t/ha (reflecting sound land-management practices in the latter), while national parks held 49t/ha (reflecting the non-extractive land use in these areas) [25]. This is excellent baseline data, and a more recent analysis would be both invaluable and revealing, because sporadic reports suggest that a general practice of slash-and-burn agriculture is taking place on resettled land [26]. This particularly environmentally unfriendly method is detrimental not only to wildlife, but to the land itself and the problem stems from a demand for quick cash crop returns combined with a lack of education on proper farming techniques. In addition, free ranging cattle and goats on public and private has contributed to severe cases of overgrazing that are often irreversible.
Aside from the denuding of designated private lands, the deforestation problem is extremely pronounced in communal lands with high population pressure [27] and is a growing problem near urban areas with high population densities, frequent power cuts, and acute paraffin shortages [28]. A recent report quotes a wood seller on the outskirts of Harare:
“This is the only business I can do because I have no capital to start any other project. For this, I just need an axe" [28].
The critical shortage of fuel due to the lack of foreign currency from exports (formerly earned from the commercial farming sector) means that the average fuel consumption and CO2 emissions declined from 1.6 tons per capita in 1990 to just 1 ton per capita in 2002, but it is unclear whether the associate increase in consumption of wood fuel has been factored into this calculation [29]. The government is exploring several imaginative alternative energy schemes [30-33], but lacks the expertise or financial resources to achieve any of them to any meaningful scale or implementation [31].
3) Pollution - Lack of governance and accountability, paired with the current survivalist mentality of the average Zimbabwean city council (and citizen), have led to severe cases of water pollution. The prime example is the Manyame River, which runs into Lake Chivero, which is Harare’s main reservoir for drinking water. The municipalities of Harare, Ruwa and Chitungwiza, along with the highest concentration of industry in the country, have all been discharging—at best—very poorly treated, and at worst, completely untreated waste-water into the Manyame River and its tributaries. The resulting degradation of the river and eutrophication of the reservoir have resulted in huge fish kills, prolific growth of invasive weeds, and exorbitant water processing costs [34-37]. News reports on the issue from other parts of the country indicate that the Manyame River is not an isolated case [38, 39].
Illegal gold panning in rivers has become epidemic amongst poverty-stricken people hoping to strike it rich [15, 39-42], apart from the devastation of river beds due to digging and siltation in rivers, the mercury used by illegal gold panners is being discarded into water bodies and accumulating in fish and higher up the food chain [43, 44]. The attitude towards panners from the government ranges from encouragement to eviction depending on the political context or simply the day of the week. [40, 45]. The resulting siltation of dams and rivers is a largely unstudied, but judging from severe gully erosion in numerous areas around the country [25, 28]one can only guess that the effects on aquatic life must be pronounced.
4) Alien Species - Zimbabwe has a serious problem with invasive plant and animal species. Some of the most notorious plant culprits are Lantana camara a noxious terrestrial weed and Water hyacinth an aquatic nuisance that blankets water bodies especially if accompanied by eutrophication [34, 37, 46]. New plants are often introduced and exotic plantations established according to the whim of a minister or development group often with little or no consideration of their potential environmental impacts or invasive qualities [ e.g.33, 47-49]. Zimbabwe’s fish fauna have also been considerably altered through introduction of exotic predators like largemouth bass, trout and robustus bream that prey on smaller native species [50, 51], while Nile tilapia have escaped from fish farms and are possibly hybridizing with native Mossambican bream throughout the country.
5) Fires - As conservancies and commercial farms were invaded, one of the first actions of the settlers was to burn the land, to flush out game for hunting or simply as an act of arson to destroy habitat and to scare landowners off their properties [52]. In some cases, these spread to National parks, causing severe management problems for game wardens [53, 54]. While savannah ecosystems are fire-dependent to some extent, if fires are extensively lit at the wrong time of year this destroys valuable fodder for wild and domestic animals, and encourages bush-encroachment [54-56]. Recent uncontrolled fires in the Eastern Highlands have severely affected conservancies and wildlife populations, national parks and destroyed nearly 2000 ha of plantation forests [54, 57].
6) Human-Wildlife Conflict – Historically, humans have battled with wildlife in Zimbabwe and regarded wild animals as vermin, crop-raiders, livestock predators or vectors of disease [58]. A change of attitude came about in the 1960’s as the aesthetic and economic values of diminishing wildlife populations became apparent [58]. In recent years much progress has been made to reduce human-wildlife conflict with methods far more creative than simply shooting ‘problem’ animals. The conflict mitigation methods included costly investments in tsetse fly control, electric fence construction, planting of chili peppers to deter elephants and sophisticated game management with harvest quotas to keep animal numbers at optimal carrying capacity [59, 60].
In many areas around the country without sophisticated barriers or conflict mitigation measures, wild animals cause significant damage. For example, in one communal area near Hwange in 2002 elephants destroyed up to 90% of people’s crops and trampled 21 people to death [61]. However CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) programs in the area that helped local communities to reap financial benefits associated with living with dangerous animals on their land primarily by selling strictly regulated quotas of animals to foreign hunters and then dividing the proceeds within the community, thus easing the economic burden of living alongside wildlife [59, 61]. If CAMPFIRE’s market for wildlife through hunting and tourism is not maintained and cultivated, then there is the risk that the cost-benefit scales will tip against the wildlife. A recent report serves to illustrate this point, as locals in Guruve are cashing in on their elephants to sell the ivory on the black market [6].
7) Dams - Zimbabwe has one of the highest densities of dams of any country on the planet, and they continue to be built (albeit at a slow rate) amid signals from the government suggesting that they strongly favour dam-construction as the solution to Zimbabwe’s agricultural woes [62, 63]. Of the 9,818 dams in Zimbabwe most occur on former commercial farmlands where they were used for irrigation of crops while only 6% of the dams occur on communal lands [64]. Dams have had a considerable impact on Zimbabwe’s biological diversity and migratory fish populations. They act as barriers to fish migration, they create artificial lake habitats where historically there were none, and they are often points of introduction of harmful invasive species of fish and plants [50].
Given the collapse of the commercial farming industry, the lack of financing for commercial and communal agriculture, and that most potential dam sites on former commercial farmlands have already been developed, the continued construction of dams in Zimbabwe is unlikely to continue to be a real threat. What is really needed is a close scientific examination of the condition of Zimbabwe’s fluvial and other wetland ecosystems, such as dambos [65]. The few remaining non-dammed rivers and unimpacted dambo ecosystems should be given protected status and research needs to be carried out into potential ways to restore the degraded systems. Older dams like Mutirikwi that are in need of maintenance should be repaired or decommissioned as they are cracking and pose flooding risks to people downstream [66].
8) Elephants – Elephants are an extremely charismatic species that have been an international conservation lightning rod; Zimbabwe today is in the unenviable position of having too many elephants - about 100,000, or 1/5th of Africa’s population [56]. These huge animals can be enormously destructive and destroy the very habitats that sustain them. Some argue that habitats are already so degraded and that game are at such high densities that some elephants are thought to have starved to death due to a lack of food and water [67]. To solve the problem and avoid the previous international criticism associated with its culling operations, the National parks is auctioning elephants off to game farmers in order to reduce the population pressure [68], but it is unclear as to whether a single elephant has been sold under this scheme yet. It was in the context of huge ivory stockpiles from early culling operations that Zimbabwe successfully lobbied for the resumption in international trade in ivory.
The re-opening of the trade in ivory in 1997 resulted in an experimental auction to Japanese buyers that realized much lower revenues than were expected because bidders simply divided up the lots amongst themselves prior to the auction [69]. Dr. Mtsambiwa, director of Zimbabwe’s National Parks service now complains of a lack of funds to manage Zimbabwe’s elephant population, [70] yet he admitted that no CITES money from the ivory sales was spent directly on elephant conservation work. On the other hand, it is widely reported that the lifting of the trade ban in ivory has resulted in a boom in international ivory markets and of elephant poaching [5, 22, 71]. Zimbabwe is therefore walking a tightrope between managing its own burgeoning elephant population and other countries where the viability of their small elephant populations is threatened by poaching. It is clear that Zimbabwe needs to adopt a careful, responsible and scientifically rigorous management program that results in secure, but manageable elephant numbers not just in Zimbabwe, but further afield.
9) Wildlife-Borne Disease – As settlers moved onto conservancies, they systematically ripped down game fences, letting game animals out into areas with domestic livestock. Several hundred head of cattle have also died of theileriosis which spread from buffalo to cattle by ticks, but the situation appears to have stabilised [11]. According to veterinarians, the current scenario has resulted in foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks [11]. The FAO has donated thousands of vaccine doses, but their application is of limited use where controls of cattle movements have been broken down. The risk of a foot and mouth disease over the last few years has also made the government of Botswana twitchy enough to have erected an electric fence along the Zimbabwe border to prevent any Zimbabwean disease outbreaks from wrecking their valuable cattle industry. However, critics have speculated that keeping Zimbabwean refugees out is an added, and possibly a more desirable benefit than disease control [72]. Anthrax is another potential threat, and in 2004 an outbreak in the Save valley killed over 1500 animals but was contained by the landowner and veterinary experts [73]. The most recent outbreak in Masvingo has killed 3 people and 130 cattle [74].