Food Security and Wild Animal Protection: Zimbabwe Struggles to Find the Balance
You might think Zimbabwe had problems enough, with out of control inflation, an uneasy power-sharing government and a collapsed agricultural economy, but there is always room for things to get worse, or, more accurately, there’s plenty of room, but everybody and everything want to be in the same places.
As many people flee the countryside after the failure of crops and historic lack of rainfall, resulting in around half the 12 million population heading for population centres where they can get food aid, wild animals have begun to invade the remaining farmlands.
Elephants and villagers in nocturnal stand-offs
Around Matabeleland elephants have broken into the crop fields and eaten the crops being grown by villagers. As well as elephant, wild pigs and baboons from Hwange National Park have begun to roam into agricultural land, causing havoc wherever crops are grown and leading to villagers having to sleep in the fields to try and drive the animals away.
The usual system is for the villagers to light fires around 50 metres apart, and that works reasonably well against elephant, but baboons ignore the fires and will enter the fields in daylight. They have become quite aggressive, meaning that while the adults sleep in the day and guard the fields at night, children and older women have to spend their days in the fields, watching out for baboon troops.
More hunting, less CITES
Paradoxically, it’s the recent good rains that seem to have triggered the movement of the animals, possibly because waterholes have filled up through rainfall, allowing them to range more freely. There has been no organized response from National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority except to say that perhaps increasing the number of elephants that can be killed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) would help resolve the problem. Zimbabwe wants to increase from 500 to 600 the number of ‘trophy’ elephants that can be hunted annually. And the National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority claims that there are more than 100,000 elephants in the country.
Zimbabwean elephant courtesy of Mara 1 at Flickr under a creative commons licence
