Parliament recommends rejection of Kangaluwi mining project
By Kabanda Chulu
Tue 13 Aug. 2013, 14:00 CAT
A PARLIAMENTARY committee has recommended the rejection of mining activities in the Lower Zambezi National Park by Mwembeshi Resources because the mining licence was issued fraudulently.
According to a special report by the Committee on Lands, Environment and Tourism on the proposed Kangaluwi mining project in the national park, the mining licence that Mwembeshi Resources holds was issued without following the requirements of the law and procedures.
It stated that Mwembeshi Resources was issued with a minimal (prospecting) mining licence by the ministry responsible for mines prior to it undertaking an environmental impact assessment (EIA).
"The issue of prospecting does not necessarily mean that a mining licence will be given. The licence is invalid and should be revoked. There should be no mining in the Lower Zambezi National Park which should be reserved and preserved as a conservation area and heritage for purposes of tourism development," it stated.
"The government should ensure that the issuance of mining licences follows the legal and laid down procedures and the work of the inter-ministerial committee should be strengthened."
Last year, Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA) rejected mining activities in the Lower Zambezi National Park, citing environmental concerns but Mwembeshi Resources appealed to environmental protection minister Wilbur Simuusa, who has since generated a cab memo.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, PARLIAMENT
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Govt cautious on sanctioning economic projects - Simuusa
By Kabanda Chulu
Mon 12 Aug. 2013, 14:00 CAT
ENVIRONMENT minister Wylbur Simuusa says the government is taking a cautious approach to sanctioning economic projects that are located within game management areas.
And Simuusa has denied assertions by Zambezi Resources chief executive officer Frank Vanspeybroeck that senior ministers in the Zambian government were surprised at the decision by ZEMA to reject the construction of a copper mining project in the Lower Zambezi National Park.
Confirming receipt of the appeal lodged by Zambezi Resources, whose US$494 million Kangaluwi Copper project has been rejected by the Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA), Simuusa said Zambians must decide what is good for the country.
"I have received the appeal from the developers of the Kangaluwi project and we shall make a final decision over the matter within this month but I want to assure the nation that the decision to be taken will be in the interest of the country," Simuusa said in an interview in Lusaka. "Also the people should take a keen interest in matters of this nature, especially that most of Zambia's oil and gas reserves are found in game management areas. So how do we handle these issues? Anyway, the decision that we shall come up with will be a landmark one since we have to weigh the advantages of having an economic project against environmental protection, human and wildlife."
He also questioned the motive by officials at the Ministry of Mines that sanctioned exploration activities at the Kangaluwi project.
"In the first place, why were licences given? So, it seems the whole process has not been right from the beginning and this is why we shall get to the bottom of the issue and come up with a decision to safeguard the interests of the country," said Simuusa. "And it is not true that ministers are surprised at the decision; maybe there are others but I am not involved and this is why I want to understand the matter and make the right decision."
Following the rejection of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) submitted to ZEMA, Zambezi Resources, the developers of the Kangaluwi project, through Vanspeybroeck, announced to shareholders in a posting to the Australian Stock Exchange that the company was currently taking steps to seek a review of the ZEMA decision as provided for in the environmental management Act 2011.
"The review is considered by the Minister of Lands, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection. Senior ministers in the Zambian government, including the Minister for Mines, Energy and Water Development remain fully supportive of the project and have been surprised at the decision of ZEMA," Vanspeybroeck stated.
"The newly elected Zambian government has gone to great lengths to convince the overseas investment community that Zambia is a safe place to invest and is encouraging of such investment in particular in the mining and resources sector."
Nevertheless, environmental activists have challenged Simuusa not to consider overturning the decision made by ZEMA to reject construction of a copper mining project in the Lower Zambezi National Park.
In the event of massive objections to the findings of an Environmental Impact Statement and ZEMA turns down construction of a project, the Minister has powers to allow the project.
For example, the MMD regime allowed the Chinese to begin mining at Ichimpe forests in Kitwe without following correct procedures.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, GAME PARKS, WYLBUR SIMUUSA
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People's govt protects people
By Editor
Mon 24 June 2013, 14:00 CAT
Government has the obligation to intervene and regulate all economic activities in order to ensure that the environment is protected.
Many business enterprises, left on their own, can cause a lot of damage to the environment and endanger the future of our people.
The motive of business should be not only to make profit but even more to contribute to the common good of society.
The decision by the Zambia Environmental Management Agency to stop First Quantum Minerals from constructing a dam that would destroy the water source on which thousands of our people depend is highly welcome and deserves the support of all. The common good is the reason for which all these public, state or government institutions or agencies are created. The common good is the reason for the existence of economic, social and political institutions. It enables people to express commitment and concern for each other. Common good calls upon all persons to contribute and commit themselves responsibly to building a just society for all.
Public institutions like the Zambia Environmental Management Agency must have as their aim the achievement of the common good. The whole reason for the existence of civil authorities is the realisation of the common good.
And businesses should be characterised by their capacity to serve the common good of society. The sense of responsibility in economic initiative should demonstrate the individual and social virtues necessary for the development.
A business enterprise must be a community of solidarity. And solidarity is a basic fact of human existence. No person is an island, cut off from others and self-sufficient. Remember the African proverb: "I am because we are, and we are because I am."
We should consistently ask ourselves: 'Is our business community responsibly promoting respect for the environment?'
The roles of business owners and management have a central importance from the viewpoint of society, because they are at the heart of that network of technical, commercial, financial and cultural bonds that characterises the modern business reality. For this reason, the exercise of responsibility by business owners and management requires constant reflection on the moral motivations that should guide the personal choices of those to whom these tasks fall.
Working for the common good requires us to promote the flourishing of all human life and of all God's creation. In a special way, the common good requires solidarity with the poor, who are often without the resources to face many problems, including the potential impacts of environmental degradation and climatic change.
Our obligations to the one human family stretch across space and time. They tie us to the poor in our midst and across the globe, as well as to the future generations.
The common good demands justice for all, the protection of the environment on which the poor depend.
Every civil authority must take pains to promote the common good of all, without preference for any single citizen or civic group. Everyone should be concerned to create and support institutions that improve the conditions of human life. Public authority must have the means to promote the common good.
Society as a whole, acting through public and private institutions, has the moral responsibility to enhance human dignity and protect human life. In addition to the clear responsibility of private institutions, government has an essential responsibility in this area. This does not mean that government has the primary or exclusive role, but it does have a positive moral responsibility in safeguarding human life and ensuring that minimum conditions of human dignity are met for all.
In a democracy, government is a means by which we can act together to protect what is important to us and to promote our common values.
The economy cannot be run in an institutional, juridical, or political vacuum: the state has its role to play, guaranteeing personal safety. David reigned over all Israel, doing what was just and right for all his people (2 Sam 8:15). As for the state, its whole raison d'etre is the realisation of the common good in the temporal order. It cannot, therefore, hold aloof from economic matters. It is the government's role to guarantee minimum conditions that make this rich social activity possible.
Furthermore, the state has the duty to prevent people from abusing their private property, wealth and the power that goes with it to the detriment of the common good.
The fundamental moral criterion for all economic decisions, policies and institutions is this: they must be at the service of all people, especially the poor. And the way society responds to the needs of the poor through its public policies is the litmus test of its justice or injustice. The impact of national economic policies on the poor and the vulnerable is the primary criterion for judging their moral value.
It is in this light that we welcome the decision by the Zambia Environmental Management Agency to stop First Quantum Minerals' dam project which failed to meet the requirements of the common good. The loss of five hundred jobs that First Quantum Minerals wants to tie to the decision by the authorities to stop their dam project is too small a bait. We know that in the desperate unemployment situation our people are in, every job counts. But it's not such jobs at any cost. There are costs that cannot be paid for with any number jobs. The lives of our people should be placed above any jobs. Of what value will it be to employ five hundred people at the expense of so many people's lives, including those not yet born?
It is good that public institutions are now starting to stand up to the power of business. For a long time, big business did what it wanted in this country and got away with it. Today, it seems there is a government in Zambia that is trying to function as a government of the people by the people for the people. The people's state protects the people. Big business, and indeed all businesses, have to be made to account. Authority is exercised legitimately if it is committed to the common good of society. Public and individual wellbeing should be developed out of the very structure and administration of the state. We are reminded in Proverbs 3:27: "Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it." And "we know that the law is good, if it is used as it should be used" (1Tim 1:8). The virtue of truth gives another his just due.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, KCM
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COMMENT - Say no to the destruction of Lake Malawi, which is what this is, and with it the destruction of the Malawian people, who depend on it's existence.
Say no to oil drilling in Lake Malawi : Allan Ngumuya’s standpoint
By Allan Hendry Ngumuya
September 25, 2012
As a citizen of the Republic of Malawi I would like to share, may be a little civic education on the subject above. This article is written without any political agenda, no! But, it is a real concern from deep down my heart.
I am also trying to educate those who do not know the effects of oil drilling, at the same time, what affect oil drilling. As a result, Malawians must stand up in unison and put a stop to oil drilling.
Lake Malawi is the third largest lake in Africa, a home to almost 1000 species. Lake malawi lies along the rift valley. Lake Malawi helps local people about 1.5million in districts like Karonga, which has the population of over 190,000 Nkhata- Bay which has the population of over 165,000 Nkhota-kota which has the population of over 225,000 Salima which has the population of over 245,000 and Mangochi with population of over 610,000.
Looking at these statistics 95% of the people from each districts, depend on commercial activities from this beautiful Lake Malawi. Lake malawi provides the most essential proteins to all 13,000,000 people of malawi and around the world. It is believed that Lake malawi has lived more than 2,000,000 years ago.
Oil and drilling on Lake Malawi ?
Oil drilling potentially have negative effects, especially to the local ecosystem. There are so many ways that can easily cause this to happen e.g. (A Spill): A spill can cause catastrophic damage if it is not contained quickly.People in these districts will feel the effect within a short period of time. This is the same as killing the back bone of socio-economical to Malawians.
We must think deep and have a vision for our country, ask: the decision we are making, what impact is it going to have on Malawians as a country ? Are our decisions helpful in the next 10-100 or even 1000 years to come? Thirdly and most important, let Malawians be involved in such critical times before the minority (government officials) make decisions for majority the (government, the people of Malawi).
If government officials make quick and hest decisions, Our lake will end up having no value at all, properties along this lake are going to be of no use. Think of all the resorts, hotels, beaches, commercial, and socio activities that are taking place there right now? From karonga to Mangochi such activities will not be there anymore. What about the people and wild life on Likoma Island, Chizumulu island, Birds island? Just to mentions a few hot spots. Oil leaks or spills can also have extremely negative effects on natural environment, containment failure, run off, pipeline accidents, and direct discharge.
We must know that no matter what, offshore Oil and Gas drilling releases toxic chemicals, these chemicals poses a significant risk to the environment. These risks affects wild life (aquatic ecosystem) and developmental effects. These toxic chemicals can accumulate and magnify in the food chain. This endangers the aquatic organisms higher in food chain such as fish and birds. This can also lead to a long term chronic exposure for aquatic organisms.
Economically, oil drilling will have an effect on tourism. The money that has been brought into malawi for the past 100 years and the years to come through this lake, can not be worth the oil that can be drilled from this lake. The quality of water as we speak is very healthy and clean. If we want to move with the world on green act law, (Malawi Go Green), Lake Malawi is our only hope in reaching such goals. We can use this lake by (eg). using solar irrigation system to areas that have no electricity and areas that are hard to find water for domestic and farm produce use. Having used the lake in this way, can help us to kill two birds with one stone, it can be an opening to many job opportunities to Malawians. Mind you, this can only be achieved if we keep our lake out from oil drilling.
Human and health impacts of oil leaks commonly occurs. People along the whole lake are going to be exposed to toxic chemicals from drilling wastes. As pollutants from oil drilling builds up in food chain, people who consume fish and other aquatic foods from Lake Malawi will be at a serious risk of health problems. There are so many diseases out there such as cancer and genetic defects. That can be so devastating to a country with small and limited economical resources like Malawi.
We must not only think or look at it financially gain, no, lets think about our people who live, breath, think and do all their day today undertakings using Lake Malawi as their primary life saver to have peace of mind. Peace of mind just as money is a result of what we do with who we are.
There will never be a recovery or repair to this beautiful lake. This is a big source of proteins, calcium, etc. A body with healthy and quality water. This lake is our Gold, let us not betray our great Lake by allowing these companies from the East, West, South or North exploiting our natural resources. As much as we are all aware that most of our natural resources has already been destroyed from luck of civic education on nature reserve.
Malawians, not anyone else, are the People who are more concerned. These companies have no concern at all, they are aiming at destroying our natural resources as much as they can, then leave us with a lake without any use or meaning. They will turn it into a dumping sink hole. Please my beloved Malawians, let us stand up and say “NO” to Oil drilling on Lake Malawi. “NEVER”.
Ask them, to go and drill in their countries. They have their own water bodies, but they can not drill because of the same reasons listed above. Their countries are still intact. It does not mean they don’t have oil, No, but, they do preserve their natural resources as well. They pretty much know that. These kind of natural resources bring about the beauty of their countries just as ours. They are stopped by their people. So do we.
As it has been stated already, Malawi must look towards 100 years or more to come, what lake Malawi can bring to it’s people. Let us say NO! To oil drilling on Lake Malawi.
*The author , Allan Ngumuya, is one of great gospel recorting musician in Malawi
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, MALAWI, POLLUTION
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COMMENT - Don't allow transnational corporations to destroy billions so they can make millions for their shareholders. Lake Malawi is too central to the future of Malawi itself to even risk it being destroyed for someone else's gain.
Oil drilling in Lake Malawi: What we can learn from Deepwater Horizon
By Ben Fuchs and John Hays
August 8, 2012
Realizing the irresponsible nature of gambling on tobacco as the nation’s hallmark industry, President Banda has wisely supported efforts to diversify the economy by encouraging development in other areas. Unfortunately, the most significant of these targeted industries – nature-based tourism and mineral extraction – cannot effectively coexist without extremely thoughtful and sophisticated management. To that end, the government’s recent actions indicating
support for oil drilling in Lake Malawi display an alarming lack of foresight and, frankly, make little economic sense for the vast majority of Malawians.
As a rural society blessed with an abundance of natural beauty, Malawi depends on the allure of its mountains, water bodies, forests and plateaus to bring in tourists and their much-needed foreign currency. Lake Malawi is, of course, the preeminent draw – and the source of income for millions of Malawians who depend on tourism, fishing, and various supportive industries for their livelihoods.
Yet the threat of pollution in the lake is nothing new: The massive Kayelekera Uranium Mine, for example, has stoked recent concern due to its construction in an earthquake-prone watershed that feeds into Lake Malawi. Just as a major spill of radioactive wastewater would have catastrophic effects upon the lake and its tourism and fishing industries, it stands to reason that a substantial oil spill could devastate the lake and the millions of lives it supports on a daily basis.
L-R: Benard Membe (Tanzania, Minister) - Ephraim Chiume (Malawi, Minister) enjoy a cup of tea at the Kilimanjaro Hyatt Regency in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in August 2012, before the lake Malawi/Nyasa discussion.
As law students from the United States working in Malawi this winter for Friends of the Earth International, we are monitoring the growing search for oil in Lake Malawi with recent and direct knowledge of the impact oil drilling can have on an ecosystem and its attendant industries: We study at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana, which is situated less than 150 kilometers from where the British Petroleum-contracted Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in April 2010, spewing nearly five million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico over the following three months. The fishing industry along the American Gulf Coast was decimated, with tens of thousands of people suddenly out of work and many more negatively affected. In short, the worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States.
Fast-forward two years: In spite of multibillion-dollar cleanup campaigns in the region, yields of shrimp, oysters, and other fish species are still a fraction of what they were before the spill. Tourism in Louisiana and other states continues to suffer. The thousands of unemployed residents who formerly worked in fishing and/or tourism now depend increasingly on the fossil fuel industry for jobs and income.
The oil spill, in effect, transformed a relatively diverse economy that had relied primarily on extraction, fishing and tourism into one that relies more than ever on oil and gas extraction – that is, a more homogenous economy where the dominant industry is the very one responsible for effectively ruining the environment and economic diversity of the place.
The basic parallels between the economies of the American Gulf Coast and Malawi are striking: From Karonga to Mangochi, millions of Malawians make their living by fishing in Lake Malawi, feeding millions more by harvesting chambo, usipa, kampango, and other species through healthy, small-scale operations. Another large segment of Malawi’s population depends on income from tourists drawn to such resort areas as Nkhata Bay and Cape Maclear by the lake’s pristine water clarity and clean, sandy beaches.
Moreover, Lake Malawi possesses two qualities that distinguish it from the Gulf of Mexico and magnify the threat posed by oil drilling in its waters: First, the lake – along with its two Great Lake counterparts to the north – supports more biodiversity than any other lake in the world, with roughly 1,000 different species of fish thriving in its clear waters.
In addition to serving as a source of fascination and scholarship for biologists worldwide, this abundance of aquatic life, coupled with consistently impressive water clarity, has allowed Malawi to develop into a prime destination for snorkeling and diving – activities that have never seemed especially inviting in the muddy Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, many, if not most, foreign tourists engage in one of these activities while visiting the major lake resorts. Thus, while the Deepwater Horizon spill did not significantly harm such forms of tourism in the United States, a significant oil spill in Lake Malawi would likely! have a ruinous effect on these major forces behind the tourism economy here.
Second, Lake Malawi is, well, a lake. The oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill dispersed somewhat thanks to oceanic currents and the Gulf’s considerable depth – to the point, in fact, where researchers cannot even find a large portion of the spilled oil (though its harmful ecological effects are, of course, becoming increasingly evident).
Lake Malawi, on the other hand, is comparatively shallow and stagnant. Thus, it stands to reason that any oil spilled in the lake would not benefit from the same natural dispersion as would a similar spill in the open ocean. Depending on the size and location of the spill as well as the timeliness and adequacy of the cleanup effort, Lake Malawi’s ecosystems and the industries they support could well be destroyed by a spill a mere fraction the size of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Entertain for a moment, then, such a post-spill vision of the lake: Iridescent globules of petroleum replace the lake’s legendary array of cichlids. Fish eagles, coated in crude, flounder in the shallows. No more dried chambo in the market. No more foreign tourist dollars flowing in at Nkhata Bay or Cape Maclear. And no more usipa next to your nsima.
All for a one-time payday that will likely only provide a substantial benefit to foreign oil conglomerates and the MPs who championed them.
Ask yourself, Malawi: Is it worth it?
**Ben Fuchs and John Hays work in Malawi as legal clerks with Friends of the Earth International, a Netherlands-based environmental organization with affiliates in 76 countries worldwide. They are also currently studying at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, MALAWI, OIL, POLLUTION
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Use natural resources to fight poverty - Brown
By Edwin Mbulo in Livingstone
Fri 22 June 2012, 13:25 CAT
POVERTY reduction, education and health care needs to be enhanced by fully utilising the natural resources that are in abundance in Zambia, says a conservation director.
In an interview in Livingstone, Mathew Brown, who is African regional conservation director for
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) based in Tanzania, said when communities felt they were not deriving the benefits out of the natural resources, they resort to abusing the source for their own gains.
"Africa still has a lot of natural resources that are of commercial interest and we are encouraging communities to get involved, a lot of threats to forests and wildlife comes from the communities, so what TNC aims to look at is how these resources can be utilised to the benefit of poverty reduction, education and health care," Brown said.
He said TNC works in 33 countries worldwide while in Africa it has operations in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia and Gabon.
Brown said the TNC got involved in supporting Community Based Resource Management (CBRM) because of the realisation that when communities got benefits from the natural resources, they got involved in their management.
"Mulobezi Game Management Area (GMA) still has great opportunities to manage natural resources for the benefit of the community and during the Mulobezi Community Conservation Action Planning workshop held at Protea Hotel we saw great political will from the district commissioner Pascalina Musokotwane," Brown said.
He added that TNC would continue to operate in the Kafue National Park and Mulobezi as long as there was need to help sustain the natural resources for the benefit of the community.
"We should not only focus on anti-poaching and forestry preservation, doing so leads to poaching," he said.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT
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Wignaraja cautions Zambia on exploitation of environment
By Kabanda Chulu
Fri 15 June 2012, 13:23 CAT
UN country representative Kanni Wignaraja yesterday warned that Zambia and the rest of the world are set on a path of self-destruction unless societies and institutions change the way the environment is exploited.
And a youth climate change ambassador Josephine Pumulo has challenged the government to stop the tendency of bringing on board all stakeholders in preparations for forums like the Rio+20 conference but fail to embrace them when it comes to implementation of the outcomes of the meeting.
During a briefing to present Zambia's key message to the Rio+20 United Nations conference on sustainable development scheduled for next week, Wignaraja said the world today had a 'once in a generation' opportunity to do things differently.
"We have to rise to the occasion and seize a moment to do things differently. If we don't change how economies produce, how societies are organised and how institutions respond, then we are headed towards a path of self-destruction," said Wignaraja.
"There is no other option for Zambia, Africa and the world but to take sustainable wise choices so that as we grow, there is greater balance between managing our economy and the environment hence there will be no excuses for the leadership in Rio, whether from private or public to deliver what can change the world for better."
Presenting the country's position at the forum, environmental protection and natural resources minister Wylbur Simuusa said Zambia had high expectations that the Rio+20 would reinvigorate international community towards integrating social, economic and environmental strands of development to ensure that current development patterns do not jeopardise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
"Two main themes of the conference are transitioning to a green economy within the context of sustainable development and poverty reduction and building consensus on appropriate framework for fostering sustainable development," he said.
"It is the poverty reduction portion of the green economy that is of particular relevance to our country and Zambia's strongest call to the conference is to rally international support towards poverty eradication by giving real meaning to this important development goal."
And Pumulo said without the involvement of young people, Zambia would not attain the desired future of having a cleaner, healthier and green environment.
"We have noticed that during preparations, all stakeholders are invited but when the meetings take place, nothing happens and people are not informed anymore," she said.
But Simuusa assured that the government had developed a plan of action dubbed 'Beyond Rio' that would undertake the implementations of resolutions of the forum.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, KANNI WIGNARAJA
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Constitutional provisions need to resonate with reality - ZIEM
By Masuzyo Chakwe
Thu 07 June 2012, 13:23 CAT
THE Zambia Institute of Environmental Management says the draft constitution has not adequately reflected its provisions on land, property, environment and natural resources.
ZIEM chief executive officer Morgan Katati said this section was the anchor of the economy and livelihood for Zambians and it should, therefore, show clarity in its format. Katati said the constitutional provisions needed to resonate with the realities on the ground.
"It should not just to fulfil the legal obligation," he said.
Katati said the issue of land, property, environment and natural resources therefore needed to be treated with utmost seriousness as it defines socioeconomic development and human survival.
He noted that for any development to come forth, there was need for holistic and comprehensive land reforms.
Katati said the provision on equitable access to land and associated resources does not adequately specify the type of resources that may be associated with the accessed land.
He explained that section (b) on security of land rights for land holders should go beyond tenure to encompass social, economic and environmental benefits.
Katati said land investments in the country had not adequately benefited local communities and their economies.
"Understanding benefits within economic confines is rather deficient. Therefore, we propose an alteration to this close for it to read: investments in land to also benefit local communities and their economy, environment and social lives. On section (3) of the draft constitution where the president may, through the lands commission, chiefs or local authorities, alienate land to citizens or non-citizens, we propose two options to this close: Completely remove the possibility of land ownership by non-citizens. There should be a clear and systematic documentation of land owned by non-citizens showing the land holder's name, the quantity and location," Katati said.
He also proposed that a sub-section be included to stipulate clearly conditions under which non-citizens could be given land in Zambia.
Katati said in order to strengthen the forest sector that had long been neglected and unrecognised at national level among other natural resources in Zambia, an additional clause should be inserted to uphold the management of forest resources.
Labels: CONSTITUTION, ENVIRONMENT
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US$4m shellfish consignment seized at Beitbridge
11/05/2012 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
A SOUTH African truck driver smuggled US$4 million worth of abalone shellfish into Zimbabwe concealed under a consignment of charcoal, a court heard.
Joseph Ndinganeni Ndou was intercepted at the Beitbridge border on May 1 after failing to declare the contraband.
Prosecutors say the charcoal and the illicit shellfish load were ordered by a Harare company, Sitric Marketing. Investigators believe the abalone – an endangered species in most countries – were destined for the Far East.
Ndou, 48, of Nancefield in Musina, was not asked to plead when he appeared before Beitbridge magistrate Gloria Takundwa on Tuesday.
He was released on US$100 after being charged with one count of smuggling under the Customs and Excise Act.
Prosecuting, Jabulani Mberesi said sometime in April, Sitric Marketing had placed an order for abalone and charcoal from South Africa.
They later engaged Chabata Transport Company to move the charcoal and shellfish to Zimbabwe.
Ndou arrived at the border on May 1 with invoices only reflecting his charcoal load. He made a false declaration to the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra).
Acting on a tip-off, detectives from the Border Control and Minerals Unit intercepted Ndou’s truck at a final check-point and directed it to a Zimra container depot for physical examination.
Under the charcoal load, police found 500 packets of abalone worth $3,853,556.36.
Abalones are large edible sea snails with a shallow ear-shaped shell found mostly in warm seas. The mollusc attaches itself to a rock or stone using its muscular foot. The fleshy foot of the abalone is boiled, dried in the sun, and canned for export.
Trade in abalones is banned in Zimbabwe. South Africa indefinitely suspended abalone fishing in its waters in February 2008 to save the species from extinction.
Abalones are a delicacy in Asia and investigators believe that is where the consignment was ultimately destined after drying and canning.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT
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Conservation and Eugenics
The environmental movement's dirty secret
by Charles Wohlforth
Published in the July/August 2010 issue of Orion magazine
THE RAIN HAD JUST STOPPED in the little eastern Kansas town of Osawatomie when thirty thousand people, gathered in an atmosphere not unlike that of a country fair, fell quiet. Their hero, former president Teddy Roosevelt, climbed atop a kitchen table and began to speak in a high, almost falsetto voice, orating amid cheering for ninety minutes. When finished, he had delivered the most controversial and influential address of his career, in which he described a radical new program that was both denounced and celebrated in newspapers across the country. The date was August 31, 1910.
The New Nationalism Speech, as it came to be known, emphasized conservation, as did most of Roosevelt’s speeches written by his friend Gifford Pinchot, who had been his conservation chief for the two terms of his presidency. But it also newly placed the “moral issue” and “patriotic duty” of conservation into the context of a racial conversation, as well as a much broadened concept of progressivism.
In appealing to the folks in Osawatomie, Roosevelt went well beyond the program he had pursued in office, proposing a powerful national government strong enough to address many of its citizens’ problems. In this new regime, government would be a general antidote to corporate power. Federal programs would control wages and hours, health, and corporate governance. The government would take over utilities and railroads if necessary to stop monopolies. Corporate political contributions would be limited and publicly reported. Most radically, this vastly empowered national government would transform America’s economy to reward only merit, using graduated estate and income taxes to pull down the fortunes of the very rich.
The states that originally ratified the Constitution had faced none of these problems and never consented to a national government strong enough to solve them, but once corporations could span the nation—and Roosevelt viewed corporate combination as an inevitable consequence of the industrial age—then only a central authority even mightier than they could prevent a few rich men from controlling the country’s laws, natural resources, and workers’ lives. Corporations already did control much of that, and the workers weren’t going to stand for it.
Nineteenth-century laws essentially gave away natural resources to the first to find them, allowing the rich to privatize immense new wealth in oil, coal, minerals, and hydropower at close to zero cost. Business interests exploited workers with as little government interference, creating grim servitude in western mining towns that would sometimes flash into violence.
Roosevelt’s New Nationalism offered federal power to manage the economy and tame the exploitation of people and resources. Instead of class conflict, all would join as equals in allegiance to a shared national identity stronger than the old links to community or state.
Americans had to learn nationalism—flag worship and the pledge of allegiance were promulgated in that era, too. The federal government at the time didn’t seem equal to many tasks. Back in 1889, when Gifford Pinchot was a young man exploring the idea of going into forestry, a recently retired secretary of agriculture, George Loring, told him forest management would never work in America because the country lacked “a centralized monarchial authority.”
Later that same year, Pinchot attended the Paris International Exposition, at the site of the brand new Eiffel Tower, where he felt deeply impressed and inspired by the immense forestry exhibit. The great world’s fairs were society’s premier tool for acculturating its people to the new, as Robert W. Rydell reports in his fascinating book All the World’s a Fair. Not only did they promote amazing technology, they also demonstrated the new relationships among people that the machines brought about, including affiliation with the symbols of national rather than community identity—monuments, mass communication and transportation, mass-produced goods, and celebrity. Contemporaries believed the fairs reduced class strife and political violence. In the United States, each fair attracted a substantial fraction of the entire population, and those who couldn’t attend read saturation coverage in the press. At the world’s fairs, civic leaders produced self-contained models of a hoped-for future in order to mold ideal citizens to live in it.
The utopia exhibited at the expositions held on American soil included and eventually drew a connection between the richness of the country’s natural resources and the superiority of its dominant race. The first American world’s fair, held in Philadelphia in 1876 to commemorate the nation’s centennial, presented Native Americans as hideous brutes fit for extinction—a message justifying that year’s warfare against the indigenous people of the Great Plains, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At the New Orleans world’s fair in 1885, comparative displays of skulls showed how Indians, Eskimos, and other “lower” races resembled criminals or animals. The enormous fair in Chicago in 1893 displayed living American Indians and other indigenous people on a honky-tonk midway where they were continuously jeered and ridiculed. Anthropologists arranged the races along the walk in a supposedly evolutionary progression from the lowest to the best, at which point viewers emerged from the noise and chaos of the carnival into the quiet of a pristine new city, built for the purpose on an immense scale and painted pure white. The symbolism conveyed an idea of evolutionary ethics wherein white Americans could grow through racial purification from an animalistic, selfish nature to become higher, more cooperative beings.
These ideas had been developed at Ivy League and other universities, at museums of natural history and anthropology in New York and Washington, in learned societies and in scientific literature. When subsequent world’s fairs focused on the West, the link between natural resources, morality, and racism was drawn ever more explicitly. The great Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis came in 1904, a critical time for the West as Roosevelt’s conservation program hit its stride. Westerners sent pieces of the landscape to demonstrate its value: for example, from California part of the trunk of a giant sequoia, and from Alaska, ancestral totem poles removed from coastal villages. They sent live people, too. The mastermind of the fair’s anthropology department promised to “represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism. . . . The method will be to use living peoples in their accustomed avocations as our great object lesson.”
Authorities shipped to St. Louis indigenous people from Alaska and the Philippines, pygmies from Africa and giants from Patagonia, and many famous Native Americans, as well; my grandmother, age seven, encountered Geronimo there, a pathetic figure in an Apache chief’s regalia displayed on a platform. Given ten cents by her mother, she paid him for his autograph, which he painfully scratched in block letters on an index card, whereupon Geronimo took her dime to another booth for a piece of apple pie. Roosevelt and his daughter Alice (whom my grandmother also met at the fair) toured approvingly, the president having sent word ahead via William Howard Taft, then secretary of war, to have the Filipino savages dressed in properly modest clothing (they wore bright silk trousers until the fair’s Board of ?Lady Managers certified loincloths as acceptable and more in keeping with the exhibit’s authenticity). Native people camped out for display according to a plan designed to show the relationship of their racial types. Scientists extensively measured and tested these people while exhibiting them—their physical size, senses, abilities, intelligence—all of which, apparently, proved the superiority of whites. Some human specimens who died were sent for dissection; the brains of three Filipinos were collected by the Smithsonian.
By the time of the San Francisco fair in 1915, the racists had shifted focus from justifying white conquest over other races to efficiently using the natural resources the dominant culture had thereby obtained. As gardeners and foresters would thin weak genetic strains and nurture the strong, so eugenic campaigners called for planned racial improvement through sterilization of people deemed inferior, beginning with anyone with a disability, and encouraged breeding by the racially superior. In War Against the Weak, Edwin Black describes how the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged the formation of an American Breeding Association that included research on humans, with funding and support from the Carnegie Institution, the Harriman railroad fortune, and the founders of the Kellogg cereal company, among others. The former president of Stanford University convened the Second National Conference on Race Betterment at the San Francisco fair, and the Race Betterment Foundation mounted an exhibit, with pictures of its illustrious supporters, including Harvard University president Charles Eliot and Gifford Pinchot.
Pinchot had entered the eugenics movement during the Roosevelt administration, joining several of the president’s other friends. He solicited contributions from scientists and social activists advocating eugenics for a three-volume National Conservation Commission report to the president at the end of his term in 1909. Roosevelt transmitted the report to Congress with the statement that it was “one of the most fundamentally important documents ever laid before the American people.”
The report’s volume on “National Vitality, Its Waste and Conservation,” by a friend of Pinchot’s, Yale economist Irving Fisher, reads like a manifesto of the progressive political movement that Roosevelt sought to lead, and its words were echoed in the New Nationalism speech the following year. Ten multifaceted recommendations called for a national administration of public health; an end to air and water pollution; food and restaurant inspection; worker safety and child labor regulation; working hour restrictions; health and safety inspection of prisons, asylums, factories, and schools; antidrug and -alcohol laws; safe drinking water; enforcement of antispitting laws; improved sewage and garbage removal; pest control; building safety inspection; school nurses and health instruction; universal athletic training; healthful changes in clothing, architecture, ventilation, food preparation, and sexual hygiene; elimination of poverty, vice, and crime. And then, recommendation ten: “eugenics, or hygiene for future generations,” with forced sterilization or marriage prohibition for people with epilepsy or mental disabilities, and for criminals, the poor, and “degenerates generally.” The report called for the creation of a new social norm benefiting eugenically favored marriages, making “degenerate” marriages as taboo as incest. “The problem of the conservation of our natural resources is therefore not a series of independent problems, but a coherent, all-embracing whole,” it concluded. “If our nation cares to make any provision for its grandchildren and its grandchildren’s grandchildren, this provision must include conservation in all its branches—but above all, the conservation of the racial stock itself.”
More than a dozen legislatures passed eugenic laws over the next ten years, which, by 1970, had authorized forced sterilization of sixty-four thousand Americans with mental illnesses, epilepsy, disabilities, or criminal records, or who were simply poor. At least thirty states passed laws forbidding marriage of eugenically unfit men and women and twenty-eight outlawed interracial marriages, including six that put antimiscegenation in their constitutions. Those marriage laws stood until 1967, when a Virginia couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, validated their marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court—after a county sheriff had burst into their bedroom with a flashlight and arrested them, despite a District of Columbia marriage certificate hanging on the wall. Four states also prohibited sexual relations between Native Americans and whites.
Roosevelt was worried about the loss of a special American quality of strength and ingenuity that supposedly had evolved among whites on the frontier. As eastern European and Jewish immigrants flooded into the country with their big families, and with the birthrates of white Protestant Americans declining, he warned of impending “race suicide.” Roosevelt’s ideal American family lived on a farm with six white children—and less procreation represented a failure of patriotism and a moral flaw, a rejection of the basic responsibilities instilled in men and women by nature. He dispatched Pinchot to study the problem with the Country Life Commission. Continuing that work, the American Eugenics Society, one of various such organizations to which Pinchot belonged, sponsored hundreds of Fitter Family contests at rural fairs, wherein couples would take intelligence and physical tests and submit to medical exams to become certified as worthy for breeding.
Roosevelt wrote, “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized, and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them. But as yet there is no way possible to devise which could prevent all undesirable people from breeding. The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed.”
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of this behavior? How could progressives who worked for conservation, national health insurance, and the rights of workers adopt an ideology of hatred against the weak?
In some ways, the inconsistencies reflect the diversity of a temporary political coalition. A lot of money and establishment power backed the eugenics supporters—a list that included John Kellogg, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Alexander Graham Bell, and many eminent anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists, including the founder of the movement, Francis Galton, who was Charles Darwin’s cousin. Joining with them was smart politics. Roosevelt wanted women to stay home with large families; Margaret Sanger, the mother of Planned Parenthood, wanted smaller families and gender equality—but both were involved with the eugenics movement. A desire for power is hardly an excuse, however, especially for powerful opinion leaders such as Roosevelt and Pinchot, who constantly invoked moral authority for their policies.
Another excuse: Roosevelt and Pinchot believed in science and expertise, and eugenics seemed scientific. The idea that the races are fundamentally different came from the creator of taxonomy himself, Carl Linnaeus, who in 1735 categorized human beings as white, black, red, yellow, or wild (Homo sapiens ferus). In the 1850s, before the rise of eugenics, according to Sven Lindqvist in his book “Exterminate All the Brutes,” some European scientists declared the “inferior races” naturally destined for extinction, and reasoned that helping that process along could only be moral. While the true superiority of European colonial armies lay in their weaponry, not their genes or culture, this ideology promoted genocidal slaughter of people in Africa, South America, the South Pacific, and Asia, and the theft of land from the victims. Charles Darwin witnessed this kind of warfare in South America and abhorred it, but nonetheless toyed with the idea of evolutionary differences between races. Darwin’s followers extended his theories to identify racial heredity as the cause of crime and immorality, and thus to justify genocide as a way of cleansing the gene pool of vice.
The flaws in these theories were evident in Roosevelt’s day. The eugenicists’ own work supporting genetic claims of racial differences was flimsy and unsubstantiated. G. K. Chesterton, Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, and other less famous writers grasped the errors and pointed them out. Pinchot’s own conservation commission report, in the volume written by Fisher, contained statements an intelligent person should have seen through, such as those that blamed the demise of American Indians and Hawaiian Islanders on their own sexual immorality—rather than the government-sanctioned violence and theft of land justified by the racists’ own theories.
Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and a groundbreaking conservationist, wrote one of the most influential eugenics books, The Passing of the Great Race, which would be laughable if it weren’t so revolting. In pseudoscientific language, Grant denies the very right to life of members of other races, using as evidence nothing more than his own prejudiced stereotypes. In Grant’s final analysis, white Americans were not racist enough: “They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Unless such an instinct develops their race will perish, as do all organisms which disregard this primary law of nature.”
This goal of creating a more racist society informed much of the cultural work of the institutions led by Roosevelt and Pinchot’s peers—not only the world’s fairs but the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, and others. Grant was an influential friend to the president and phrases and ideas from his writing crept into Roosevelt’s. Oddly, the improvement of the dominant race meshed with the New Nationalism’s utopia of a merit-based society. Without money or class to distinguish them, the sexual attraction between men and women would be guided only by natural selection. Those unbiased choices would automatically sort mates by the proper eugenic criteria, matching the best to the best—white to white, intelligent to intelligent, and so on. That this absurd notion was considered a basis for social policy reveals the extent of the collectivism envisioned in Pinchot’s brave new world.
The program Roosevelt advanced in his New Nationalism speech called for a stronger sense of national affiliation than ever before, a feeling of membership powerful enough to allow the federal government to regulate daily life, to curtail use of resources in favor of the future, and to redistribute income and inheritance to create economic equality. He asked for cooperation on a grand scale. In theory, the idea makes sense that racism could glue together a national identity capable of incorporating the rest of progressivism. To buttress a group’s willingness to cooperate, enhance the members’ sense of belonging and their hostility toward nonmembers—teach them that they’re special, superior, and under threat. Bind together an American majority by equating its white racial dominance with Americanism.
I’m not saying Pinchot or Roosevelt schemed dishonestly to increase American racism. Roosevelt’s philosophy could be inconsistent—he also spoke eloquently of the ability of nationalism to transcend race. The evidence suggests that Pinchot and Roosevelt rode along with the eugenicists rather than led their movement. But eugenic ideas slid frictionlessly into Pinchot’s worldview, a rigidly moralistic construct of conservation, efficiency, and merit. And that construct of ideas worked politically, for a while.
Eugenics thrived in America until discredited by the revelation of the Nazi death camps it had helped inspire. Grant’s book particularly incited Hitler, who wrote him a fan letter calling it his “Bible” before inscribing its hatred upon the flesh of millions of people. (The same Nazi officials who slaughtered human beings in death camps also passed some of the world’s most advanced legislation to protect the environment and endangered species, even outlawing cruelty to animals, including the sort of medical experimentation they performed on their human victims.) World War II’s horrors saved our country from going farther down the eugenic path, but Roosevelt died before that happened, and Pinchot’s life carried him in a new direction. By the 1930s Pinchot had become a champion of the poor and admirer of indigenous cultures, and he spoke out early against German anti-Semitism.
But words live on without their authors. The concepts of eugenics are far from dead today, as a quick Internet search will reveal. There’s a hangover for conservation, too. The American environmental movement remains predominantly white and middle class, detached from minorities, immigrants, and the poor along the same lines of class and color that existed a century ago. We’re liberal and say the right things, but in the 1980s and ’90s, mainstream environmental organizations debated opposition to immigration, using arguments that differed in little but terminology from those eugenicists would have used. More broadly, our political language for protecting the environment is about conflict between forces of good and evil, the fear of annihilation, and the exaltation of purity. It’s the language of war, with dark undertones of racism we’ve inherited but no longer recognize.
Garrett Hardin’s 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons,” describing the grim fate faced by unmanaged natural resources such as open-access fisheries, influenced a generation of environmental thinking with its perspective that only a powerful, coercive state could save greedy people from themselves. But Hardin’s real concern was the doomsday prediction of Third World population growth (a prediction that has proven overblown and simplistic). In the 1970s he opposed humanitarian aid to poor countries, hoping to stop their population increases through starvation and disease, and opposed immigration to preserve America as an island of wealth and environmental quality. Hardin believed compassion was a weakness that was bound to be eliminated by natural selection.
In the 1980s, Hardin’s writings helped form an anti-immigration branch of the environmental movement, which shared many members with organizations that advocated for laws requiring the use of English only. Enough environmentalists shared this point of view to bring about a highly publicized national vote by members of the Sierra Club to oppose immigration in 1998. The proposal failed, but the existence of the debate suggests the durability of the links between racism, nationalism, and conservation. The connections don’t by themselves undercut calls for conservation or implicate anyone as prejudiced simply for wanting to protect nature. But they do illuminate the ethical hazards that come with the kind of power Roosevelt sought to accomplish his goals. Without justice and equality, conservation can become, rather than an intrinsic good, a part of a greater evil.
IT WAS IN AN IMPROBABLE PLACE that I first learned about these troubling connections. I was attending a cultural heritage week in a tiny Alaska Native village in Prince William Sound doing research for my book The Fate of Nature. In a garage, a carver and counselor from the village of Port Graham, Jim Miller, was teaching teens to work with wood, leaning over his knife in a folding metal chair while chatting about the meaning of their Chugach culture.
Miller brought up the Nazis in one of our first conversations. He didn’t distinguish between Nazi genocide and the genocide against Native Americans. In the eugenicists’ world, Jews and Eskimos each were merely a lower rung—writing in 1915, Henry Fairfield Osborn, an influential president of the American Museum of Natural History, used the supposed impossibility of educating Eskimos as a basis of his scientific argument that northern Europeans represented a higher step in evolution. Jim struggles against this ideology every time he consults photographs of traditional art to inform his carving; anthropologists stripped the region of the originals a century ago and took them to big city museums. Jim also encounters this ideology in his counseling practice, with men and women who have internalized the lessons of inferiority and carry on the oppression against themselves, through depression, self-destructive anger, and alcohol abuse. Miller believes community healing depends on reclaiming personal value.
The racists remain his adversary every day, even in the village clinic where Jim works and where we later talked about eugenics. “We think that’s history,” he said, “but what’s the trickle-down? In this building there is very free and easy access to birth control. Any type of birth control you can imagine, and if you still find yourself pregnant, there is free abortion. There’s no polite way to say it—to cut down on breeding. It’s not just accessible, it’s promoted. Kill your baby. And when you talk about values changing, when you no longer see your children as a blessing, that is some really bad stuff.”
I felt uncomfortable. I support free birth control and legal abortion. I had to stop and think. It’s true the eugenicists debated how to promote family planning among the inferior but not the dominant races. It’s true free family planning services often focus on poor and minority communities. Historians have documented—as neither Jim nor I then knew—that some of today’s major organizations for population control grew directly from the eugenics movement, like branches on a family tree. As Jonathan Peter Spiro points out in his chilling book Defending the Master Race, “the organizers of Planned Parenthood, the Population Reference Bureau, and the Population Association of America were all former eugenicists. Similarly, the first director of the Population Council (the organization funded by John D. Rockefeller III to promote family planning in the Third World) was eugenicist Frederick Osborn.”
Good motives inspired this population-control work—to save nature and improve human existence. But the eugenicists had precisely the same motives. I wouldn’t charge family planning advocates with racism, but I’m not a victim of genocide. Victims shouldn’t have to analyze the motives of their oppressors. Once our scientists and philanthropists unleashed this monstrous hatred, it lived and transmuted uncontrolled, deforming society itself, and now, somehow, the descendants of slaves and displaced Indians are partly responsible for our redemption—by forgiving us and by loving themselves.
Many Alaska Natives remain hostile to environmentalists, despite often sharing their goals. Some environmentalists’ elitism, purism, and good-versus-evil worldviews still reflect the attitudes of their intellectual ancestors. Norms live in the culture like genes, manifesting themselves unexpectedly, the way a child’s big ears appear from an ancestor of whom no picture or name remains. We’ve forgotten the fathers of eugenics, but not their moral tone, as pure knights of conservation fighting the corrupt and degenerate wasters of nature.
Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech helped introduce that rhetoric, with language that has not lost its inspirational ring:
Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.
But the politics of division can’t help the Earth now. Nature is endangered by threats that come from no specific villain or location. The oceans grow warmer and more acidic, marine mammals are contaminated, dead zones spread, plastic debris flips from wave tops to beaches and into the guts of birds. No one is innocent.
Categories won’t help us—nation, race, good, and evil—for they have little to do with humanity’s need to fit within a global ecological niche. Power won’t help us either. Power itself is a good deal of the problem, as coercion divides the people who must ultimately work together. Besides, the powerful have never instigated the kind of social transformation we now require. The solution has to come up from the people, through persuasion, enlightenment, and the creation of new norms, until the powerful are swept irresistibly along in the new social reality. This is a better job for the weak, who often have more at stake in the loss of nature, a closer relationship to its gifts, and a greater capacity to recognize when a certain level of material wealth is enough.
Understanding the history of racism in the conservation movement is important, not to assign blame, but to diagnose our unhealthy relationships with each other and with nature, learn from our mistakes, and begin cooperating in the ways that we must in order to reverse our destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, EUGENICS, POPULATION CONTROL, RACISM, WORLD WILDLIFE FUND
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Dutch Publication: Prince Bernhard was deeply involved in weapons trade
Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars.com
April 15, 2009
Although no big surprise for those who have familiarised themselves with the subject, the conclusions of a recently published book on prince Bernhard’s activities should work like a hot cup of coffee for the drowsy and intoxicated.
In the past week the publication ‘the prince can sell me more nonsense’ (as of yet not translated to English) gained some Dutch mainstream media attention. Author and historian Gerard Aalders, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, has enveloped himself in research concerning Bilderberg-founder Bernhard von Lippe-Biesterfeld. He emerges with some sobering conclusions about the German prince and his international dealings. A bitter pill to swallow for those who are in the habit of surrendering their will to royal bloodlines. In an interview with the Dutch Quote magazine on April 3, Aalders elaborates on the necessity of his book:
‘This is the indispensable counterbalance to all those welcome stories about prince Bernhard. (…). This book covers not even 10 percent of the nastiness surrounding Bernhard. The rest is locked up safely behind closed doors. There are many icebergs under as many tips.’
Although there is some sense in the general public of what the prince was up to, he is usually characterised as a somewhat corrupt but nevertheless lovable scoundrel. Aalders asks himself:
‘How does a man who lies, scams, accepts bribes, cheats on his wife, serves only his own interests, consorts with unreliable individuals, arms deals, corrupts ministers, continuously spreads false stories about himself, remain so extremely popular for so long?’
A just question. Although Bernhard was compromised by a famous bribing scandal in 1976 (the so-called Lockheed affair), it has been thoroughly watered down throughout the second half of the 20th century by constant reinforcement of a mythical Bernhard who supposedly fought the Nazi’s from his hideout in London during the war. As so often is the case, the propaganda bears little resemblance to the truth.
Bernhard, himself a Nazi in the 1930s, had formally denounced National Socialism in order to work his way up the Dutch (which means German) royal hierarchy. But his loudly proclaimed rejection of Hitler did not mean he disapproved of his methods- as the prince energetically presided over illegal transport of Nazi’s to South America in 1945.
In a certain sense he did denounce classic Nazism, for Bernhard realized very early on that it wouldn’t do to side with the Nazi’s in the long run, as they were destined to be crushed between the two rising giants, the United States and Soviet Union: the world’s foremost future management teams. After the war, the German prince took up his place at the table of the board of directors and assumed the role of chairman of the first Bilderberg-conference in 1954. After being asked what the most remarkable new revelations in his book are, Gerard Aalders sums up the most striking:
‘The financial network that Bernhard broached through the Bilderberg-conferences.’, ‘He was deeply involved in weapons trade. The Lockheed bribing scandal is notorious, but he also had dealings with Northrop and Agusta.’
As Aalders’ research shows, the above mentioned corporations are top arms manufacturers with extensive ties to the annual Bilderberg-meetings. Aalders also mentions Berhard’s frequent business trips to Argentina in the 1950s, where the prince managed to arrange a huge railroad contract for the Dutch corporation Werkspoor after both receiving and handing out all kinds of kingly gifts.
Besides huge amounts of money used to pay off the fascist Argentinean command, Evita Peron insisted on being rewarded with some Dutch honorary medal to seal the deal (while singing to the Argentineans, not to cry for her). But the prince’s ambitions did not end with Latin America. His gaze wandered eastward to that other, easily subdued continent- Africa.
Here was a honey pot of immense proportions for the Prussian bear to grope. To get his hands on the natural resources of the continent, Bernhard set up a dummy corporation to steak out the grounds. Its name was the 1001 club and its signboard was painted up with the brightest and noblest colours imaginable. Under the guise of environmentalism the 1001 club was born in 1970 with the aim of raising funds for the World Wildlife Fund (of which prince Bernhard was the first chairman, and top-eugenicist Julian Huxley was the founding father). Aalders comments on the members of the exclusive club in a recently aired news item on Dutch national television:
‘I can’t name all thousand of them, but they were people with a very nasty reputation. The members of this club in their own way had a vested interest to maintain good relations with all kinds of nations in the third world. Especially nations with all kinds of precious resources like oil, gold, diamantes – those kinds of things.’
According to the website of the World Wildlife Fund (currently known as the World Wide Fund for Nature), the club aspired to ‘stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment, and building a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.’ Decoding the Orwellian cryptics, it simply means ‘to confiscate the planet’s natural resources and conduct eugenics with perfect impunity’. Members of this club? To name the most prominent: the British and French branches of the Rothschild genealogy, David Rockefeller and two of his brothers, king Juan Carlos of Spain, the British Petroleum representative Eric Drake, a plethora of European dukes and princes, viscounts and lords, and (to end on a curious note) sheikh Salem Bin Laden.
A true convergence of criminals to be sure. Their game was diabolically simple and effective. Loans were extended to third world nations with very reasonable interest rates on the condition that the loan sharks got to plant their teeth within their borders and suck out the natural resources.
Thanks to the controlled media, facts about the prince have taken their sweet time in coming to light. To prevent waiting another five decades for more information to come out about the current new world order chieftains, it is vitally important to expose their final goals by uncloaking the many pretexts through which they mean to accomplish them. Pillaging nations and imploding economies in the name of the environment remain the favorite activities of the global elite. Like the plundered third world nations, the first world will soon find out that accepting loans from the new world order means certain and lifelong enslavement.
Source:
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, EUGENICS, POPULATION CONTROL, WORLD WILDLIFE FUND
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Bharti aims to entrench green culture
By Gift Chanda
Wed 28 Mar. 2012, 12:59 CAT
BHARTI Airtel has announced significant milestones in its endeavour to build a ‘green' environment friendly mobile network and reduce its carbon footprint in Africa.
The company stated that over the last one year, as part of its commitment to the environment, the company has reduced the number of telecom sites running solely on diesel by more than 50 per cent by overcoming the challenge of lack of grid connectivity through use of innovative models such as Hybrid Battery Bank.
"By 2013, Bharti Airtel aims to completely eradicate the constant use of diesel to power its network. This means no telecom site of the company will rely solely on diesel power 24 hours a day," the statement released by the company read in part.
Hybrid Battery Banks collect the excess energy produced by the diesel powered generator in a battery that powers the site once the generator is switched off.
"This has helped reduce the use of diesel by up to 14 hours a day," it stated.
The telecommunication giant said close to 60 per cent of its telecom sites in Africa are now powered using the Hybrid model resulting in major reduction in emissions and also operating costs for the company.
"This milestone is the result of significant steps by Airtel taken to ensure that we reduce our fuel consumption and that we play our part in conserving the environment. We will continue to do so as the year progresses," chief technical officer Eben Albertyn said.
"Our first priority is to reduce the number of sites that are completely reliant on diesel generators. We are doing this by connecting these sites to grid electricity in areas where this option is feasible. Where it is not, we are exploring alternative forms of power supply, which include Hybrid Battery Banks and solar or wind power."
The company is targeting over 70 per cent of all its sites to be powered by the hybrid model by end of 2013.
Airtel added that it is also working on the use of solar and wind power to run its telecom sites.
Labels: BHARTI AIRTEL, ENVIRONMENT, MOBILE PHONES
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Scott to meet MCM, ZEMA over closed leaching plant
By Misheck Wangwe in Kitwe
Tue 27 Mar. 2012, 12:57 CAT
VICE-PRESIDENT Guy Scott is today expected to meet Mopani Copper Mines and ZEMA in Lusaka to discuss the future of the closed Mufulira West Heap Leaching Mine. And the Southern Africa Resource Watch, which will be part of the meeting, says it expects the government to take punitive measures against Mopani for abrogating the law and polluting the environment.
The Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA) closed Mopani's the Heap Leaching Mine three weeks ago following complaints by residents of Butondo about massive pollution.
Mopani Copper Mines chief executive officer Danny Callow who confirmed the development said the company hoped that the meeting with the Vice-President Scott would address the issues surrounding the closure of the mine.
Callow said due to the closure of the mine, the company was losing about K525 million a day.
He said 310 jobs might be lost if the mine were not reopened.
"Our hope as a company is that the current situation will not continue because we need to save the mine and the potential job losses which we view as serious. We hope by tomorrow (today), a resolution will be found on how to restart the mine again while making sure that all stakeholders are happy," Callow said.
He said prior to the stop notice which was issued by ZEMA, Mopani engaged the residents of Butondo in a stakeholders forum to try and address the issues surrounding the operations of the Heap Leaching Mine and the acid mists that were allegedly affecting the residents.
Callow said Mopani Copper Mines attached great importance to issues of environmental health and its operations would always be within the confines of the law.
And Southern Africa Resource Watch campaign officer Edward Lange said Mopani Copper Mines must be given a time frame in which to adhere to the set out benchmarks given to them by ZEMA.
Lange said ZEMA and Mopani had the responsibility to ensure protection of the environment and the lives of the people of Butondo before reopening the mine.
"We are going into this meeting with a view that Mopani must be put in its rightful position. We have laws that govern this country and this company is not above the law. The situation on the acid mists that were being released and affecting the people and the environment was extremely unacceptable," said Lange.
Over 3,200 Butondo residents in Mufulira have been pressing government and ZEMA to take action over the strong acid mists that were being produced by the Heap Leaching Mine and had allegedly affected people's health since 2006 when the ponds were commissioned.
ZEMA northern region manager Patson Zulu said the environmental authority had carried out independent investigations and it was discovered that the mine needed critical improvements in its operations to stop the acid mists and other mining activities that were allegedly affecting the environment and the residents' health.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, GUY SCOTT, MCM, MOPANI, POLLUTION
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Trump sons' Zimbabwe hunt investigated
Trophy ... Donald Trump Jnr poses next to a buffalo he had just shot on Zimbabwe hunt
25/03/2012 00:00:00
by Reagan Mashavave I AFP
A CONSERVATION group on Friday said it was investigating whether a hunting trip to Zimbabwe by US property magnate Donald Trump's sons was legal, after photos of their trophies sparked outrage online.
Trump's sons Donald Junior and Eric made a hunting expedition in Zimbabwe in August 2010. Their pictures went viral on social media this month, showing them posing next to carcasses of a leopard, an elephant, a crocodile and an array of other animals.
The images drew condemnation on Facebook and Twitter, where their hunting trip was slammed as unethical. Donald Trump Jr has insisted on Twitter that he did nothing wrong.
Johnny Rodriguez, chairman of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, told AFP that most professional hunt guides register with his organisation or with the government-run Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority.
But he said his organisation does not have a record of the Trump brothers' hunting trip.
"We have people on the ground investigating. We want to find out if the hunting was ethical," he said.
"There is a lot of corruption and unethical conduct going on in the safaris. We want to find the truth and where the money generated from the hunting went to.
"We have been told that the Trump brothers were saying they gave game meat to locals who were starving, that's an insult to local people.
"These people are wealthy. If they wanted to help the people of Zimbabwe, why didn't they build schools or something like that, than to say that they gave meat to starving people. The area they are said to have hunted is Matetsi and there are no people who live there."
The trip was organised by Pretoria-based Hunting Legends International, which specialises in big game hunts for the wealthy.
The company has insisted that the hunt near the world-famous Victoria Falls was completely legal, and has kept pictures of the Trumps with their kills on its website.
"The entire hunt was done strictly according to the laws of the Department of Nature Conservation in Zimbabwe and, as is custom in these government-controlled areas, a staff member of the department escorted the hunt at all times," it said in a statement on its website.
"The hunt was entirely legal and ethically conducted as prescribed by the industry norms and regulations," it said. "None of the animals hunted were on the endangered species list and are plentiful in the area the hunt was conducted on."
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But the outrage over the hunting trip has already cost Donald Trump one advertiser from his US reality television show "The Apprentice", according to US media.
The pictures show Donald Junior holding a knife and a severed elephant tail, and sitting with a rifle next to a slain Cape buffalo. The brothers are also seen holding a leopard carcass, and standing next to a crocodile hanging from a tree.
"Donald Trump Jr. your're loser, ditto head. i'm a hunter. i hunt for meat, not horns. you can't eat horns," read one Twitter post.
"Men who hunt are not men," read another.
"Someone needs to stop these fools, maybe even hunt them," another said.
Donald Trump Jr has insisted the trip was legitimate.
"In the area I was in, the the wildlife board wanted to decrease the numbers for the benefit of the herd. Like liberal deer limits," he tweeted. "I am also not going to apologize because some eco nuts want me 2."
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, GAME PARKS, WILDLIFE
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New environment law spells stiffer penalties
By Kabanda Chulu
Tue 06 Mar. 2012, 11:00 CAT
COMPANIES or people flouting environmental procedures will now face stiffer punishment with increased fines as outlined in the new environmental management Act of 2011.
According to provisions of the new legislative framework that has replaced the environmental protection and pollution control Act of 1990, penalties for not conducting an environmental impact assessment will attract a penalty of K126 million or five years imprisonment.
Penalties for not keeping or submitting records to Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA) will attract a K54 million fine or three years imprisonment.
Contravention of environmental standards and guidelines would cost K126 million or seven years imprisonment while offences relating to chemical spillage would K90 million or five years in prison.
Offence relating to hazardous matters would attract a penalty of K180 million or 10 years imprisonment.
Under enforcement orders, offences under waste management will attract a penalty of K18 million or one year imprisonment and licence holders who breach conditions of a licence will pay K54 million or three years imprisonment.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT
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Rich nations muzzle out African nations
Saturday, 03 December 2011 00:00
[Mrs Florence Nhekairo] Isdore Guvamombe in DURBAN, South Africa
NEGOTIATIONS by developing countries to get binding funding and greenhouse gas emission reduction guarantees under the Kyoto Protocol fizzled from a plenary affair to subtle country to country negotiations, as eking a lasting agreement remained a distant mirage.
Rich nations, some of which had earlier on threatened to pull out of the Kyoto Agreement negotiations, successfully used their financial and political muscle to dismantle open negotiations as the United Nations Climate Change Conference entered day four on Thursday. The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The major feature of the Kyoto Protocol is that it sets binding targets for 37 industrialised countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
hese reductions amount to an average of five percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012 but developed nations feel that it slows their industrialisation.
In an interview, head of the Zimbabwean delegation and Secretary for Environment and Natural Resources Management overt to the covert.
"As it stands we have more or less put aside plenary negotiations and gone for consultations, one on one country negotiations and we hope to finally come up with something.
"As the African group we have taken the position that the Kyoto Agreement cannot die on the African soil.
"We are already affected by climate change and we are seeking funding guarantees for projects and legally binding agreements to reduce greenhouse emissions.
"As developing countries we are not legally bound, we are only asking for a greenhouse funding to offset the intermittent droughts, shifting farming seasons and high temperatures.
"We need funding to help us adapt because to us it means less rains, it means less food and it means less water,'' said Mrs Nhekairo.
At the end, it is envisaged that the developing countries could end up with a win-win situation with the developing world in the form of Kyoto Protocol stage 2 or something else.
Labels: CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT, POLLUTION
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Zinwa in bid to revive dying rivers
Friday, 04 November 2011 00:00
"I went to Lake Chivero the other day with my wife and I did not like what I saw. I also went to Middle Sabi to see the Ratings Project and from the plane I was travelling in, I could see the death of the Save River as a result of siltation."
This was a quote from a speech made by Finance Minister Tendai Biti in September this year during the commissioning of 375 000 pound draglines acquired from Britain for de-siltation of Save River and the controlling of water hyacinth at other water bodies.
This was after Zinwa made the conscious and deliberate decision to save Zimbabwe's dying rivers and water bodies. Siltation of rivers is becoming endemic in the country particularly in regions where there is acute illegal panning of minerals especially gold. Rivers has been reduced to rivulets. More often than not children born after Independence or tourists are shocked why the more than 600 metres long single span Birchenough Bridge was built over the river. Save's majesty is now a story of folklore and historians. It would amuse many that the Portuguese at one point considered making the river the shortest route to the Indian Ocean by ships.
Save like many other rivers in the country has been a victim of stream bank cultivation and more recently illegal diamond panners who invaded the Chiadzwa diamond fields. In their frenzy to exploit the new Eldorado very few or none were concerned about their activities choking the river with sand.
Mazowe River is threatened with extinction too. The river is exposed to heavy siltation and chemical infiltration from illegal gold mining activities along its banks.
Mashonaland Central has abundant deposits of alluvial gold easy to extract for the less experienced miners.
They only need a pick and shovel, mercury for concentrating and welding the fine gold particles together and lots of water to process the gold from gravel.
Clean water is used to clean the yellow metal and the residue is thrown into the river further increasing soil erosion into the river with already fragile banks.
The trade being mostly informal, the panners make their quick money from illegal metal traders and move on along the river banks. No soil reclamation or environmental rehabilitation ever takes place leaving the loose soils free to be eroded by strong winds or rains into the river, which is naturally the lower point. Glittering gold is an easy source of money to the poor communities compared to agricultural production. The people are not ready to wait for say four or six months labouring before harvesting. Gold panning is an instant market, get your ore today and trade on the spot.The choking of rivers and environmental degradation is not limited to Mazowe but has spread across the mineral rich provinces of Zimbabwe. This has extended to Midlands town of Kwekwe, Mashonaland West towns of Kadoma, Chegutu and Karoi.
Lake Chivero is a scenic and attractive water body less than 30km from Harare City Centre. This makes it one of the closest water tourist resort. The 3 200ha dam provides swimming, boating and fishing facilities or simply casual walks into the savanna woodlands surrounding the dam. However, this resort is slowly being choked by water hyacinth. This is a fast spreading weed that can cover the whole water surface within a short space of time. The weed, according to water experts thrives in water bodies that have high levels of raw effluent pollution. The weed can be controlled in two ways: mechanical through the use of draglines or chemically through spraying. However, use of chemicals affect other aquatic life hence the preference of mechanical weed control.
The acquisition of the draglines is not an end in itself but Zinwa's commitment to manage the country's water bodies as espoused in the Zinwa Act.
The authority is being proactive in saving dying rivers, however, at a pace permitted by our financial resources.
Of the two recently purchased draglines one shall be stationed at Middle Sabi irrigation scheme while the other one shall be used around the other six catchments areas. Minister Biti was convinced that the water authority was using resources from the treasury better than many Government departments and deserved more if resources become available.
"As long as you use the money properly like you are doing, we will continue giving you the money," said Minister Biti, pledging to release more money for the acquisition of more draglines.
* We welcome enquiries and suggestions. Please channel then to Zinwa PR Department, 12th Floor Old Mutual Centre Corner 3rd and Jason Moyo Avenue, Harare. Email: pr@zinwa.co.zw. Phone (04) 797604/5;797610-3
Zinwa remains concerned by the continued siltation of rivers by gold panners and other illegal miners further compromising the accessibility of water to downstream communities and increasing the changes of hazards such as droughts.
In achieving this mammoth task of equitably distributing water, Zinwa needs the assistance and co-operation of all its stakeholders including Government ministries and departments.
These among others include the Ministries of Mines and Mining Development, Environment and Wildlife Management and the Environmental Management Agency. The problem of mining is a huge potential problem for access to clean water. In South Africa, the City of Johannesburg is battling with acid water from mines surrounding the metropolitan.
The acid water from the mines is seeping into and contaminating fresh water sources thereby reducing availability of clean water to more than five million people in the city. However, Zimbabwe is lucky that there are no mines closer to the densely populated urban centres.
This, however, does not lessen the danger posed by illegal panners to the entire water systems in the country.
Zinwa, therefore, is calling for stiffer and deterrent penalties against illegal miners and other people whose activities are a danger to water sources.
In view of the impending summer season, Zinwa is making concerted efforts with other stakeholders to contain water sources contamination by illegal panners.
This exercise needs the support of all for every drop of water counts especially in the face of climate change being experienced the world over.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, POLLUTION, WATER
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Project greens Kebvunde, raises cash
Tuesday, 11 October 2011 00:00
Noah Pito Features Correspondent
WHEN the Environmental Management Agency, then the Department of Natural Resources, donated fencing material to the Kebvunde community under Chief Nematombo in 2004, not many people imagined the material could trigger such an organised gardening project that has since emancipated 164 families from the shackles of poverty and hunger.
Having been forced for decades to preside over unnecessary disputes emanating mainly from brushwood gardens, then randomly scattered around Kebvunde Dam, a village head in the area Mr Dobiah Majinjiwa, had to approach EMA for a lasting solution to the environmental mismanagement that had reached alarming levels.
Indiscriminate cutting down of trees for repairing brushwood gardens destroyed by veld fires and termites coupled with unsustainable siting of the gardens triggered conflicts as villagers competed for the dwindling resources.
Recalls Majinjiwa: "After people had exhausted all the forests close to the dam, they had no wood left for construction of the gardens.
"Although some completely abandoned their projects as a result, the more daring ones continued scouting for trees and bushes that had survived so they could repair their gardens.
"In most cases they would do it during the night for fear of being arrested by the village authorities.
"We discovered that there was a real problem as all those parts of the catchment area finally developed gullies."
He said as he pointed to bare areas that he said used to be thickets two decades ago. When he approached EMA for a solution, Mr Majinjiwa was advised to sit down with his people and craft a constitution to guide them through a conservation-based gardening project which would as well yield financial gains for the villagers.
This saw the Majinjiwa Village merging with three other villages - Chidembo, Munjoma and Nyamadzawo - who also happened to be beneficiaries of the Kebvunde Dam water.
A detailed constitution was then crafted and forwarded to EMA for consideration.
The focus of the project, according to the constitution, was to increase vegetative cover in the catchment area of the dam, improve nutrition in the area through providing a variety of vegetables, improve biospecies diversity as well as raising per capita incomes of the villagers through the sale of vegetables.
As a result, the four villages received assistance from EMA in the form of 11 bundles of barbed wire, eight corner posts, two gates, 22 rolls of mesh wire, 114 standards and four bags of cement among other things.
These materials were then used to construct two large gardens that face each other from the south and northern sides of the dam.
The two lush gardens measuring about six hectares have since done proud to the 164 families whose standard of living they have now elevated.
According to Mr Majinjiwa, the communal gardening project which they named Kebvunde Consolidated Garden, has also fostered cordial relations among the villagers, most of whom are now working together with no more disputes as during the brushwood gardens' period.
Mr Majinjiwa said due to awareness programmes carried by EMA over the years, most people were now very positive to the need for conservation in the area.
Presently they have also embarked on improving sanitation in the gardening project with digging of four pits for the construction of Blair toilets having s been completed.
Each garden is set to have two latrines for the convenience of the members and a Magunje businessman, Cecil Kashiri has chipped in with enough cement for the construction of the latrines.
According to village head Zebediah Nyamadzawo, one of the committee members, everyone in the garden is a policeman and there are steadfast principles which members should abide by.
"Theft of whatever nature warrants instant dismissal from the project. No one is also allowed to bath, wash clothes or use any dangerous substances in the dam. Whenever there is a funeral in the area no one should be found working in the project until the deceased is buried.
Failure to comply results in a heavy fine. Ploughing in the catchment area is also among the biggest taboos," he said.
Today, the project supplies several areas with vegetables.
These include Magunje Growth point, Karoi and Chirundu.
The project has also assisted people from areas like Karereshi, Chiware and Mahororo who have since abandoned gardening projects following the drying up of the seasonal rivers they depended on.
Dozens of women from these areas daily throng the communal project to exchange their labour for vegetables.
After watering an agreed portion, one is given a corresponding amount of vegetables to take home for the family.
"These gardens are helping us to push through the dry season. It's a matter of just coming here and agreeing on the size of portion one is prepared to water so that one can get their bundles of vegetables," said 28-year old Sekesai Nyahuni of Chiware who had come for the food for work arrangement.
According to another member in the project, Mrs Simbisai Kamwaya of Chidembo Village, the garden has empowered villagers in the area particularly women who she said are now able to get an income which they can spend according to their own plans.
"My husband does not work and we have survived very well from the sale of vegetables. Every week groups of at least five members contribute amounts ranging between US$5 and US$10 each, towards a society and if it is one's turn to benefit that week, definitely one will be able to replenish all the basics like soap, cooking oil, sugar and parrafin.
The garden in fact has liberated women because we no longer look up to men for some of the family needs.
"Most of us have also managed to buy bags of cement for flooring our kitchen huts. Payment of school fees no longer gives us headache.
"When a child asks for a pen I no longer ask their father to provide because I can now do it myself," said Mrs Kamwaya.
Although their dam which was constructed in 1950 still holds enough water to serve the four villages in the area, the greatest challenge faced by the project is siltation of the dam.
Mr Lazarus Shonhiwa said there was need to scoop the dam whose capacity he said has since dwindled over the years due to large volumes of soil it swallowed.
Mr Shonhiwa also lamented the condition of the spill away which virtually no longer exists after it was destroyed by heavy rains during last seasons.
The same sentiments were also echoed by Mrs Magaret Bvumbanyama who said the dam was likely not to take them through the next five years due to siltation.
"As you can see the water has turned muddy and this is the biggest sign that all is not well with our dam.
"So if we could get some assistance from government to scoop out the excess mud the better.
"One other area of concern is that it was better if the project was turned into an irrigation scheme whereby people would turn to the use of pumps rather than carrying water in buckets on top of their heads. The distance we are moving is just too long.
Although the project has helped us much, carrying water in buckets on top of our heads is no joke, no wonder why we end up engaging other people to do the watering in exchange for vegetables.
Hurungwe District Environmental Officer Mr Munyaradzi Gandidzanwa said his department was looking at ways of saving Kebvunde Dam.
"We are soon to establish indigenous woodlots upstream as a way of improving biospecies diversity and arresting formation of gullies.
"So far we have been in the process of reclaiming the gullies in the catchment area south of the dam using vetiver grass.
"It has proved to be successful. In a matter of some few days we are going to supply beehives to the gardening project so that the beekeeping project runs alongside as spelt out in their constitution," he said.
Labels: CHIEFS, ENVIRONMENT
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