Tanzania: Pastoralists Not Threatened by Legislation Amendment
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Arusha Times (Arusha)
4 October 2008
Posted to the web 6 October 2008
Arusha
The chairman of the Ngorongoro Conservation Authority Board of Directors Pius Msekwa has allayed fears of mass eviction of pastoralists from the area.
He said reports circulating that hundreds of livestock keepers would be moved out under the on-going amendments of legislation were false.
Mr. Msekwa told representatives of pastoral communities living there that the authority has in the past made clear its position on the matter.
"We have time and again insisted that only families that settled in NCA in later years would be evicted and not those who have been there prior to the 1960s" he said.
Those who would not be bothered include the nomadic pastoralists who were resettled in Ngorongoro after the creation of Serengeti National Park in 1959.
Ngorongoro Crater
The board chairman made the clarification on the matter at the start of a meeting aimed to brief the pastoralist community leaders on the proposed amendments of the legislation that created the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
It is estimated that the entire NCA has about 60,000 people. Experts have warned that the fragile ecosytem in the area could be affected by human and livestock population and man made activities.
About 2,000 families were to be evicted and resettled in at Oldonyo Sambu vilage near Loliondo, the Ngorongoro district headquarters but the exercise has been postponed several times.
Those earmarked for eviction are also among families that shifted to NCA after 1975 when the government stopped additional people settle there permanently and prohibited mechanised farming.
The measure is to reduce human population in the entire NCA ecosystem, which experts say, was too fragile for increased human activities.The area has 117,000 head of cattle and 164,000 goats.
Although the planned eviction has the blessing of the powerful Ngorongoro Pastoralist Council, an autonomous body which works with NCAA on projects targeted to livestock keepers, there had been fears that the matter could trigger conflict between the local people and government authorities.
Experts say NCA, one of the leading tourists attractions in the country, can support not more than 100,000 people if it is to remain ecologically stable for many years to come.
Civic society groups defending those lined up for eviction argue that the livestock keepers were forced by ravaging droughts to settle in the Ngorongoro highlands and that it would be unfair to move them out.
Mr. Msekwa said NCA was a world heritage site that must be conserved for the benefit of the country and the international community and that the government would ensure that the local people benefitted from tourism earnings
The authority has already acquired 400 hectares of land near Karatu where blocks of family quarters for many of the 360 NCAA workers would be constructed starting this financial year.However, the NCAA headquarters would remain where it is; near the crater rim.
The main feature of the NCA is the Ngorongoro Crater, which is the world's largest unbroken, unflooded volcanic caldera. The Crater, which formed when a giant volcano exploded and collapsed on itself some two to three million years ago, is 610 m (2,001 ft) deep and its floor covers 260 km' (102 square miles).Estimates of the height of the original volcano range from fifteen to nineteen thousand feet high.
Relevant Links
Although thought of as "a natural enclosure" for a very wide variety of wildlife, up to 20% or more of the wildebeest and half the zebra populations vacate the Crater in the wet season. However, an effect of this 'enclosure' situation means that the population of Ngorongoro lions is severely inbred, with many genetic problems passed from generation to generation. This is due to the very small amount of new bloodlines that enter the local gene pool, with very few migrating male lions entering the crater from the outside. Animal populations in the crater include most of the species found in East Africa, but there are no impalas , topis , oribis , giraffes , or crocodiles.
Read comments. Write your own.
|
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright © 2008 Arusha Times. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Make allAfrica.com your home page
|
RSS Feed
Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >> | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
