DONOR POLICY
To develop a new, or to rehabilitate an existing, public
protected area is normally considered to be a function
of government, and should be executed with public funds.
The rehabilitation of Coutada 5, and especially the
wildlife re-introduction and social development
programs, will be an extremely expensive undertaking.
Normally this development will have been dealt with and
funded by the government of Mozambique. Whilst
acknowledging the urgent need for drastic improvements
in the field of nature conservation, Mozambique
unfortunately do not have the fiscal or human resources
available to rehabilitate the seriously over-exploited
protected areas of the country, Coutada 5 included...
Private enterprises such as Africa Futura Wildlife
Restoration Lda will thus have to play an increasingly
important role in the crucial fields of socio-economic
upliftment and nature conservation. The rehabilitation
of Coutada 5, and the concomitant social actions
emanating from this development, will be a hugely
expensive undertaking. Early estimates are that the full
development of the Coutada will cost upwards of US $30
million, with the major portion of the funds being
allocated to the wildlife re-introduction program. The
Company accepted from the onset that the development of
the project would be tremendously expensive, and also
that in order to achieve the wide-ranging conservation
and socio-economic objectives of the venture, donor
assistance would have to be solicited.
Donor assistance will be needed for socio-economic
upliftment programs, including upgrading of the current
destructive and ineffective crop production practises
and the training of the smallholder farmers, as well as
to achieve the conservation objectives which lie at the
heart of the project. Such financial assistance will be
used to develop the core wildlife-wilderness block of
210 000 ha, to purchase and translocate viable
populations of those herbivore and carnivore species
that became locally extinct due to historical
over-utilization, to train smallholder farmers in new
and more productive agricultural techniques, and to deal
with the involuntary resettlement program of households
from the core wildlife area in an amicable and
economically viable manner, to the full satisfaction of
the resettled families..
Donor assistance will have huge benefits: a new
protected area, stocked with a variety of wildlife
species that became locally extinct due to unsustainable
anthropogenic disturbances, will come into being, while
the successful implementation of extensive social
upliftment programs will have wide-ranging
socio-economic benefits in a poor and undeveloped
region. In the absence of donor funding, these laudable
objectives will mostly fall by the wayside.’
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