The management of the Limpopo National Park (PNL), in the southern Mozambican province of Gaza, is working with the provincial government to start resettling 6,500 of the 20,000 people living within the park boundaries next year.
According to a press release from the park management received by AIM on Tuesday, these are residents of 10 villages along the Shinguedze river, who eked out a living from subsistence agriculture, fishery and cattle raising.
The document says that the Gaza provincial government is to meet on Wednesday with representatives of the local communities and the park management to work out strategies to transfer those people to new areas.
The PNL is part of the Greater Limpopo Crossfrontier Park, established late in 2002, that also includes the Kruger National Park, in South Africa, and the Gonarezhou Park, in Zimbabwe. The ambitious trans-national project has the main objective of creating an eco-tourism and forestry and wild life conservation area, covering about 4.4 million hectares.
The resettlement activities "are being undertaken in the context of better integration of the Limpopo park into the Kruger and Gonarezhou", said Antonio Elias, the chief of the Limpopo park public relations department. He said that poaching in the PNL area has dropped significantly, thanks to redoubled efforts of inspection.
He added that a four-line telephone switchboard was inaugurated in March, as part of efforts to facilitate the implementation of the project and attract more investment to the park, hailed by environmentalists as the best eco-tourist project in the world.
Arms-exporting governments are reneging on their promises by failing to take into account the impact that the trade has on poverty, Oxfam says in a report published today.
Sales are diverting resources from areas such as health and education.
The report, Guns or Growth, says six developing countries - Oman, Syria, Burma, Pakistan, Eritrea and Burundi - spend more on arms than they do on health and education combined.
It says governments that sell arms can assess the impact it will have on poverty, and that they should agree an international treaty to control the trade and safeguard sustainable development and human rights.
"Government failure to stick to their own promises on arms exports means that children are denied an education, Aids sufferers are not getting treatment and thousands are dying needlessly," the director of Oxfam Great Britain, Barbara Stocking, said.
The report says:
+ in 2002 weapons delivered to Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa constituted more than two-thirds of the value of all arms deliveries worldwide
+ an average of ú12bn a year is spent on arms by countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa: enough to to put every child in school and to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015
+ in 2002, 90% of all arms deliveries to Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa came from the five permanent members of the UN security council.
+ in sub-Saharan Africa mili tary expenditure rose by 47% in the late 1990s and life expectancy has fallen to 46 years.
+ the world spends about ú30bn on aid and ú490bn on defence.
+ in 2001 Tanzania spent ú22m on a British military Watchman radar system: enough to provide healthcare for 3.5 million
Fonte: AIM
