Maputo – Mozambique’s President, Armando Guebuza, witnessed the signing of a joint management accord to run Gorongosa National Park, in Sofala province, in central Mozambique Tuesday. The agreement was between the Mozambican government and the Carr Foundation, a non governmental organization which aims to bring back the park to its previous splendour, as a major tourist destination. President Guebuza was quoted by state-owned Radio Mozambique as saying that the agreement opened up the opportunity to involve the park dwellers in the management, abandoning the trend of removing people living in the areas surrounding such parks. “By involving residents the park seeks to valorize the thousands of Mozambicans living in the park and thus having them taking care of the natural resources and the biodiversity in the park,” the president said. “This allows for a healthy interaction between populace, government and the foundation, for the benefit of nature and all involved.”
Guebuza was optimistic that international interest in tourism in Mozambique is on the rise. The country was seeing increased investment in hotels, the number of tourists visiting the country was growing, and there is considerable hope that Mozambique will benefit from tourist spin-offs from the 2010 Football World Cup to be held in South Africa.
A few weeks ago, the President recalled, the Bay of Pemba, in the north of the country, was admitted to the Club of the Most Beautiful Bays in the World. That event and Tuesday’s ceremony “shows how diversified are our tourism offers”.
The Gorongosa ceremony, he added, “also represents our commitment to conserve and value the biodiversity we inherited from our ancestors, and our unbending determination to use it in a sustainable manner”.
Conservation of ecosystems was not an end in itself, Guebuza stressed. Instead the conservation areas, and their fauna and flora, should serve the country’s socio-economic development. The government had no intention, he said, of abandoning the interests of the 120,000 or so Mozambicans who live within the boundaries of the conservation areas, and their buffer zones.
Instead the “new paradigm” adopted was one of “participatory management” of natural resources, so that Mozambican communities would be “strategic partners” in tourist undertakings, with the opportunity of benefitting from tourism. The interests of local communities, private business and the state would be integrated in tourist projects “in a balanced manner”, Guebuza pledged.
The country’s wild life, he insisted, must in the first place “benefit Mozambicans and the development of Mozambique and of all humanity”.
Guebuza recognised that current logging activities and slash-and-burn agriculture on the Gorongosa mountain range posed a serious threat of erosion. “We shall continue to seek solutions to ensure that the Gorongosa range, an integral part of this ecosystem, is protected from erosion”, he said. “This necessarily involves replacing, in cooperation with the communities, the current economic activities with others that do not degrade the soil and damage biodiversity”.
He called for the replanting of ironwood and other precious hardwood trees on the mountain range, and suggested involving local schools in the reforestation activities. The mountain range, he said, “should continue to be the renewable source of clean water that feeds the park, the crops of the communities, their livestock and other activities in the surrounding areas.”
The President of the Foundation, Greg Carr, told the ceremony “people from across the world will come here, and they will see the best that Planet Earth has to offer, for the Park is extremely beautiful, and they will also see the best that humanity has to offer – creative, generous and kind human beings”.
He thought that Gorongosa was an example “of the highest beauty that God has created in any part of the world”. It contained, on the mountain slopes, “the only true humid tropical forest in Mozambique – it is a world treasure of biodiversity”.
Tourism in the national park, Carr said, “creates jobs for the local communities, and the division of tourist revenues with the communities helps build schools and health centres in the traditional communities around the park”. In addition the park management team was helping peasant farmers increase the productivity of their fields.
He stressed that his foundation was assisting in what was a genuinely Mozambican project. 98 per cent of the park’s management and work force are Mozambican nationals, and “the restoration of the Gorongosa Park is a Mozambican project guided by a Mozambican vision”.
The Tuesday ceremony follows a contract signed in January between the government and the Carr Foundation to co-manage the Park for 20 years. That contract came after three and a half years of restoration activities under a Memorandum of Understanding between the government and the foundation. Up to 2007, the Carr Foundation had invested 10 million US dollars in the park.
Gorongosa’s wildlife was devastated during the war of destabilisation, when the park was occupied by the apartheid-backed Renamo rebels. The once thriving elephant population was virtually wiped out, as were most other large mammals. The current management has been painstakingly restocking the park, particularly with grazing species such as buffalo, zebra and wildebeest that are key to the stability of the ecosystem.
The park management is currently engaged on a large herbivore count, a survey of the carnivores (Gorongosa once had the largest lion population in Africa), a fish survey and a map of the highly varied vegetation. There are plans to set up a permanent biological research centre in the park.
The park covers 4,000 square kilometres, located at the southern end of the East African Rift Valley. Towering over the park is the Gorongosa range, which is 1,862 metres above sea level at its highest point.
