Thursday, 19 September 2024
Thursday, 19 September 2024
Zimbabwe has reportedly okayed the selective slaughter of elephants to feed citizens left hungry by the country’s worst droughts in decades.
The nation, in the southern part of Africa, has the second-largest population of African elephants in the world, 84,000 of them. Botswana has the most.
“We can confirm that we are planning to cull about 200 elephants across the country. We are working on modalities on how we are going to do it.” Tinashe Farawo, Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Authority (Zimparks) spokesperson, told Reuters.
The cull will reportedly take place in Hwange, Mbire, Tsholotsho and Chiredzi districts.
According to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs published last month, Zimbabwe lost more than half of its harvest and 7.6 million citizens were at risk of acute hunger due to the El-Nino-induced droughts.
As per the World Food Programme, 42 percent of Zimbabwe’s population lives in extreme poverty; 26.7 percent of the children have stunted growth.
Zimbabwe is not the only African country that has okayed the slaughter of its wildlife to feed its people. Neighbouring Namibia last month decided to cull 723 wild animals, sourced from national parks and communal areas, to provide the drought-hit population with meat.
On August 26, Namibia’s ministry of environment announced that it was contributing “30 hippos, 60 buffalos, 50 impalas, 100 blue wilderbeast, 300 zebras, 83 elephants and 100 elands” to support the government’s drought-relief programme.
“We are discussing with ZimParks and some communities to do like what Namibia has done so that we can count the elephants, mobilise the women to maybe dry the meat and package it to ensure that it gets to some communities that need the protein,” Zimbabwe’s environment minister Sithembiso Nyoni was quoted as having said.
For years, Zimbabwe has been trying to garner international support to restart the international ivory trade to support its fragile economy.
Organisations concerned with protecting the environment and wildlife have opposed Zimbabwe’s attempt to benefit from its ivory stockpile.
“Culling of elephants must be stopped,” Farai Maguwu, executive director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, a civil society outfit in Zimbabwe, wrote on X. “Some are eying an opportunity to sell ivory, illicitly - what with these private jets flying out week in, week out. With the way minerals are being looted, soon we wont have any elephant to talk about. Hands off our wildlife!”
Zimbabwe has about $600,000 worth of ivory stockpiles that it cannot sell, according to The Guardian newspaper.
Zimbabwe’s environment minister Sithembiso Nyoni last week told parliamentarians that the country had more elephants than its forests could accommodate, CNN reported. She said that the abundance of elephants had increased the human-wildlife conflict in Zimbabwe.
The country registered 50 deaths because of human-wildlife conflict in 2023 and the number declined this year to 31, according to a report in the Zimbabwean newspaper The Sunday Mail.
