Africa Faces up to Growing "Environmental Debts"
COPYRIGHT 2000 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY
December 31, 2000
LAGOS, December 31 - "You may see a few lonely Zebras grazing on the grassland, but that's all," said a British pub owner David Pat at a Christmas party, when describing his recent trip to a game reserve in northern Nigeria.
Pat's experience is no strange, for Nigeria is currently among the fastest tree-cutting countries in Africa. Official statistics show that nearly 80 percent of the original forests, habitats for various wild animals, have already gone and only 12 percent of the country's land area is covered by forest.
The oil-rich Niger Delta is an epitome of the country's ecological problems.
"Stains in rivers, soot on the buildings, smoke in the sky, towns lit up by round-the-clock gas-flaring ... gone are the astonishing Niger rainforest sunset," said a foreign tourist returning from a short journey to the region.
The deteriorating environment in Nigeria is somewhat a mirror of Africa as a whole.
According to a recent U.N. report, Africa lost 39 million hectares of tropical forest during the 1980s, and another 10 million hectares by 1995.
An estimated 500 million hectares of land have suffered soil degradation since 1950, including some 65 percent of farming land.
Moreover, a total of 14 African countries are subject to water scarcity, and a further 11 will join them by 2025.
The environmental problems in Africa are really worrying. Though the some 370 billion foreign debts African countries have owed are always a worldwide concern, warned some experts, the African continent has been accumulating even more formidable " environmental debts".
This is because some environmental losses are irreversible. Groundwater polluted by industrial and agricultural chemicals cannot readily be cleaned. Top soil washed or blown away in a few years takes centuries to replace. Extinct plant and animal species are lost forever.
Some conservationists attribute the problems to unchecked population growth on the one hand, and conflicts and wars on the other.
For example, Nigeria, currently with a population of more than 110 million, is regarded as a country with the fastest population growth on the African continent during the past decades, which is largely fueled by its oil boom started in 1960s.
The population explosion naturally took its toll environmentally, when people turn to the forests for firewood and land.
The long-term losses to Nigeria of not acting up to the prevention of the environmental degradation stand at more than 5, 100 million dollars per year, or more than 15 percent of the country's current gross domestic product (GDP), according to an estimation by Ali Ensha, a high-ranking official with resident office of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) in Lagos.
Consecutive years of skirmishes, conflicts or regional wars in Africa also greatly destruct environment.
A U.N. study shows that by 1991, the wildlife populations of national parks and reserves in Angola had been reduced by civil war to only 10 per cent of their 1975 levels. Similar losses have also been seen in the Great Lakes region, which boasts Africa's largest rainforest.
Large numbers of displaced people resulted from wars directly affect environment. The Rwandan refugee crisis in mid-1994 led to an influx of more than 600,000 people into the Ngara District in northwestern Tanzania.
Some of them harvested firewood, built shelters and poached in the nearby Burigi and Biharamulo game reserves. They put some 15, 000 hectares of land under cultivation in Ngara alone.
Besides, some unwise policies and unsuitable development are also blamed for environmental degradation.
During the first half of the 20th century, the colonial authorities imported to some African countries inequitable economic development policies and patterns which largely neglected the adverse impacts on the environment.
In the push for accelerated economic growth after independence, many national development projects in some African countries failed to take into account the adverse impacts of their activities on the environment and natural resource base, according to the U.N. report.
A local analyst said that the hasty industrialization drive financed by the windfall of petroleum dollars in Nigeria is largely responsible for its downward agricultural production and degradation of its environment.
Fortunately, African nations have finally come to realize the great importance of environmental protection to their economic development and people's life.
They have shared a common view that the poverty of the poor majority of Africans is "a major cause and consequence of the environmental degradation and resource depletion", said the U.N. document.
More and more African countries have now developed National Action Plans to combat desertification and begun to consider how to suit their policies, programs, laws and institutional arrangements to natural environment.
It was reported that some African countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Seychelles and Uganda have incorporated the environmental rights and responsibilities of their citizens in their constitutions.
Nigeria started sorting out its environmental problems by setting the year of 2008 as a deadline for gas flaring in the oil fields, which burns off 75 percent of the country's gas yearly yields without economic return.
Actively responding to the Nigerian government's call for environmental protection, foreign oil giants like Shell and Chevron have invested billions of dollars to set up gas liquidation plants in Niger Delta.
And international cooperation to protect central African rainforests, home to more than half of Africa's wild plant and animal species, is also underway.
Earlier this year, leaders from six central African states signed a declaration with an aim to stop the chainsaws, which swallow up some 40,000 square kilometers of forest in the region every year.
On September 10 this year, seven elephants were airlifted from South Africa to the Kissama National Park in Angola, preluding to an 11-million-dollar project to restore the pre-war beauty of the park.
Another 300 elephants and other animals including Roan antelope, eland, dwarf forest buffalo, hippo, southern reedbuck and waterbuck will be introduced to the park in the coming years, said Wouter van Hoven, president of the Kissama Foundation, which is backed by the Angolan government and private South Africans.
The newly arrived animals are confined to a 50-acre area ringed by an 8,500-volt electric fence and patrolled by 60 former soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles, making them the most protected animals in Africa, said an Angolan army general, who participates in the program.
"The civil war is basically over and Angola is one of the most beautiful countries in Africa. We are convinced that tourism will certainly start moving in Angola," said Hoven.
"We hope this will be a way to assist in the political calming of the country, a vehicle to focus on something other than the war, '' he said.
"Judging from the enthusiasm of the people,'' he added, "that can happen."
With these actions, people have the reason to believe that the "environmental debts" will be paid up someday.