As the world’s largest migration in the Serengeti plains—including two million wildebeest, zebra, and Thomson’s gazelles—has come under unprecedented threat due to plans for a road that would sever the migration route, a far lesser famous, but nearly as large migration, is being silently eroded just 1,370 miles (2,200 kilometers) north in Ethiopia’s Gambela National Park. The migration of over one million white-eared kob, tiang, and Mongalla gazelle starts in the southern Sudan but crosses the border into Ethiopia and Gambela where Fred Pearce at Yale360 reports it is running into the rapid expansion of big agribusiness. While providing habitat for the millions of migrants, Gambela National Park’s land is also incredibly fertile enticing foreign investment.
According to Pearce, Ethiopia has leased 400,000 hectares, much of it within Gambela National Park, to foreign agribusinesses including Karuturi Global Limited of India and Saudi Star owned by billionaire Sheik Mohammed Hussein Ali Al Amoudi. Part of the problem is the park is not quite official.
“It turns out that the park, though marked on maps, has never been formally gazetted. In any case, according to Cherie Enawgaw of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority, a government agency, the park may have a handful of rangers but it has ‘no management plan and no clear indicated boundary,'” Pearce writes. Currently, the Ethiopian government officially plans to change the borders of the park in order to suit its agricultural development.
Yale360 further reports that the foreign agriculture investment is impoverishing locals of the Anuak community, who have lost the forests and wildlife on which they depend.
Given record food prices worldwide and rising concerns about food security, Africa is being seen by many as the last great frontier for massive agricultural expansion. A number of developing nations, including China and South Korea, have even begun leasing vast swathes of land in Africa on-the-cheap as essentially food insurance for their growing populations.
The world’s second largest migration of land mammals, the Sudd migration (named after the vast wetlands where it originates) only came to light recently. In 2007 the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) surveyed the southern Sudan region after decades of civil war had left it neglected and found wildlife populations surprisingly intact. In addition, to over a million migrating antelope the region sports healthy populations of buffalo, giraffe, lion, and thousands of elephants.
“I have never seen wildlife like that, in such numbers, not even when flying over the mass migrations of the Serengeti,” survey leader and renowned conservationist J. Michael Fay said in 2007.
But now, the question is, will it survive?
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