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Ethiopia: In Need for a Few Friends
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The Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)
COLUMN
30 April 2008
Posted to the web 30 April 2008
B. Mezgebu
Addis Abeba
A millionaire somewhere in East Asia buys a chunk of forest land in the Amazon. It wouldn't be your ordinary transaction, though. The buyer vows not to cut even one tree. He will not own either the fauna or the flora in the true sense of the word. What then is the big deal in owning a forest?
This kind of investment or buyout is becoming less and less unconventional and people are doing it more and more to help the planet, if you like. It has been said that in the Amazon jungle, it is not easy to be a forest. Nobody talks about reforestation in the Amazon. Restrain is a taboo word. Cut, burn are the buzz words.
So what a few philanthropists are hoping to do is to purchase woodlands and save the Amazon from itself (countrymen) or even from its governments of the day. Forests in that part of the world are commonly regarded, much as they do in Africa and other developing countries, as transient resources that have to give way to some other so called investment which would give its investors hefty and quick money.
In the Amazon, first came ranches with intent to produce beef for the export market. Later came soybean farming, also for export. Currently, it is both soybeans and sugarcane to be used in the making of biofuel.
The Amazon in short is in need of few friends and that is why people are chipping in by buying forests from governments sharing the region. You might call it virtual transaction since in reality the buyers disavow real ownership and the privileges thereof. The trees in the Amazon, they hope will get a break. The catch is that the Amazon is too huge a place to be bailed out by a few millionaire charity givers here and there.
Now that was the Amazon. How about closer to home in Africa? Friends of Conservation, an international charity organization, has been working to protect threatened species and their habitats and to develop education projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
One such project assisted and carried out by the Friends for Conservation has been the protection of the Rhino in Mara, in the Massai land in Kenya. What the organization had been doing in essence is rhino surveillance. This enables it to observe animal harassment, carry out ecological monitoring and educate the public on how to live and let live in the area, mainly with the rhinos. On a daily basis, over 12 hundred kilometers volunteers and professionals drive collecting vital data and human activities in the ecosystem. The rhino now has a future. Thanks partly to Friends for Conservation.
In Ethiopia, on any given time, there are quite a number of species that are in danger of being lost to its citizens, never to be seen again. These species need a few fast friends. For instance, fish in Ethiopia are threatened. Pollution is one cause for worry. But physical extinction of several kinds of fish is a stark possibility.
These fish that are in the act of vanishing are minor, yes, but they are critical in the food chain for the bigger and more important fish like the Nile Perch. Experts in the field recently testified to that. The whole system is in danger because of the troubled lakes themselves.
Enter friends. Businessmen and others including ordinary people could take up the cause for our troubled lakes and could embark in helping them recover. "Feel their pain", as they say. It costs money and commitment, but what are friends for!
Another category of natural resources that are in dire need of friends are our rivers; all over the country in general and in Addis in particular. Much has been said and written (including in this column), about the depressing state of the streams in Addis.
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River environs, under normal situation, are places of beauty pleasant both visually and to the olfactory. A gurgling river is music to the ears, even if poetry is not your specialty. That is what rivers look and sound. In Addis, the rivers are out of this world and they are deep in dystopia.
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