Grasslands of the World.pdf - Disasters and Conflicts - UNEP

The changing face of pastoral systems in grass-dominated ecosystems of eastern Africa 49
in the world. Thus, conflict and complementarity between conservation and
development have become major issues in Ngorongoro (Homewood and
Rodgers, 1991), Mkomazi (Rogers et al., 1999), Selous (Neumann, 1997) and
Tarangire (Igoe and Brockington, 1999).
Mkomazi Game Reserve in Northern Tanzania is a 3 200 km 2 savannah
area stretching from the Kenya-Tanzania border to the northeastern slopes of
the Pare and Usambara mountains. Mkomazi lies within the Somali-Maasai
regional centre of endemism (RCE) (White, 1983), where the dominant vegetation
is Acacia -Commiphora bush , woodland and wooded grassland . Mkomazi
borders the Afromontane RCE, with the lowland and montane forests of the
Usambaras recognized as an outstanding centre of plant diversity (Davis et al.,
1994), an endemic bird area (Stattersfield et al., 1998) and a centre of endemism
for many other taxa (Rodgers and Homewood, 1982). This “dry border” ecotone
position means that Mkomazi species richness may be enhanced not only
by the presence of species primarily associated with the adjacent ecosystems ,
but also by divergent selection driving the evolution of new forms (cf. Smith
et al., 1997). This diversity makes Mkomazi particularly valuable to opportunistic
land users like pastoralists, but also for conservation of its rich species
and landscape diversity. Based on the perceived species richness and concerns
by the conservationists about the impacts on Mkomazi’s vegetation of large
numbers of cattle grazing in the western part of the reserve and large mammal
populations, the resident pastoralists were evicted from the park in 1988 and
use of its resources by the neighbouring communities was prohibited.
Mkomazi has been widely presented as undergoing ecological degradation
prior to the 1988 evictions and recovery since then (e.g. Mangubuli, 1991;
Watson, 1991). Data to confirm or refute that claim are as yet unavailable
(Homewood and Brockington, 1999), but eviction was viewed as a risk -averse
decision from a conservation point of view. However, from a pastoral point
of view, the eviction did have serious impacts on the livelihoods of those who
were evicted. Besides pastoral people, a large number of non-pastoral people
also depended on the reserve for their livelihoods and used the reserve for
beekeeping, collection of wild foods to supplement their diets or for sale at
the local markets, and collection of fuelwood. Since the eviction, an estimated
25 percent of the livestock population have been restricted to a narrow and
insufficient grazing area between Mkomazi reserve and the mountains bordering
it to the south. Others have moved away from the reserve onto the increasingly
crowded rangelands. Options for long-distance migration were greatly
reduced, as the evictions occurred three years after the proliferation of largescale
commercial agriculture in northeastern Tanzania (Igoe and Brockington,
1999).
The impact of the evictions from Tarangire National Park, north-central
Tanzania , shortly after its creation in 1968 was not felt immediately. There
was no large-scale farming in the region at that time and pastoral Maasai were