Tanzania is proceeding with plans to build a road through its Serengeti National Park. The thoroughfare will cut across the northern section of the famed reserve and provide a link to cities in the northwestern part of the country.
Conservationists, both inside and outside the country, nonetheless believe the project will be disastrous, affecting the million wildebeests and zebras that migrate annually in one of the planet’s most extraordinary spectacles. The World Bank, taking into account such concerns, rejected a funding proposal for a similar highway in the 1980s, thereby killing the ill-conceived plan.
The 33-mile section of the highway in the park will be flanked on both sides by 164-foot buffer zones. Commercial trucks will be able to use the corridor because it will no longer be designated as parkland.
Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete has promised that the section of the road through the Serengeti will be surfaced with gravel to minimize its impact on the reserve. “I want to assure them that I am also a staunch supporter of the environment and will be the last person to allow something which is going to destroy the nature,” he said in July, referring to foreign activists.
Kikwete’s project can go forward at this time, however, because Beijing will finance it. China has a long history of building and maintaining Tanzanian infrastructure, most notably the Tazara railway, which was built in the first half of the 1970s.
As the New York Times has pointed out, no one is disputing Tanzania’s right to build the road. “It is a choice between the wrong kind of development and the right kind,” the paper noted late last month. Yet Kikwete does not have to choose the soundest proposal because the Chinese now stand ready to fund the worst possible one at his disposal.
No comments:
Post a Comment