German group to invest 13 mln US dollars in Zimbabwe park: report
http://www.monstersandcritics.com
Sep 13, 2011, 12:11 GMT
Harare – A German conservation group is investing 13 million US dollars into
a major Zimbabwean wildlife park, which is battling poaching and land
invaders, reports said Tuesday.
The Frankfurt Zoological Society handed over equipment including a plane,
4×4 vehicles, radios, trucks, tractors and firefighting equipment, for use
in Gona re Zhou National Park, said the official Herald newspaper.
‘We have invested a lot into the project and we have so far spent about
three million US dollars and we will be spending a million dollars every
year for the next 10 years,’ said Hugo van der Westhuizen, project leader of
the FZS.
‘We want to make an impact in capacitating national parks to deal with
poaching and several other problems,’ he said.
Gona re Zhou, which means ‘place of the elephants’ in the local Shona
language, forms part of a giant trans-frontier conservation area together
with parks in neighbouring South Africa and Mozambique.
The Zimbabwe side has been badly hit by poaching as well as land invaders on
the back of President Robert Mugabe’s controversial policy of land seizures.
Poachers killed seven elephants in the park in June.
The government has so far been unable to evict 1,000 families from the local
Chitsa clan who invaded the park in 2003. The families, together with their
cattle, have posed a threat to the wildlife in the area.