Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Stein, 1991). This marked the beginning of broad market-oriented economic
reforms - on-going for over 20 years now - and also facilitated the shift, in 1992,
from a single-party state to pluralist politics. These changes were central to
unleashing growth in Tanzania's moribund tourism industry, which by 1989 was
earning only US$60 million annually from 138,000 visitors (Honey, 1999).
Aided by policies that liberalized financial regulations and sought to encour-
age foreign and private investment, the tourism industry grew at over 10 per cent
per annum throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 was estimated to be generating
over $700 million annually (World Bank/MIGA, 2002). This rapid growth was
centred in three emerging 'circuits': the northern game and mountain parks
including the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and Kilimanjaro; the less-developed
southern parks of Ruaha, Selous and Mikumi; and the coastal islands of Zanzibar
(Unguja and Pemba) (MNRT, 2002). The northern wildlife and mountain circuit
is by far the most important of these; half of all tourists to Tanzania visit
Ngorongoro Crater and Kilimanjaro National Park, despite its small size,
accounts for about 45 per cent of the total annual income of the Tanzania
National Parks (TANAPA) authority (TANAPA, 2005).
1
As tourism boomed in the 1990s, it brought increasing national revenues but
also growing congestion in the core destinations, particularly the famous parks in
the northern part of the country. Ngorongoro Crater gradually became a scene of
dozens of safari vehicles carving up its verdant caldera floor, racing from end to
end in pursuit of lions and rhinos. In Tarangire National Park, for example, the
number of tourists in its 2600km
2
increased from 7290 in 1987/88 to 58,061 in
1996/97 (Sachedina, 2006).
As tourism's importance grew, other socioeconomic forces posed growing
threats to the wildlife that the expanding industry depended on. Tanzania, like
Kenya to the north, underwent an epidemic of commercial poaching in the 1970s
and 1980s that led to a loss of about half of its elephants and nearly all its black
rhinos (WSRTF, 1995). Other wildlife species had also become widely depleted
by bushmeat poaching, a result of a declining law enforcement capacity on the
part of the state authorities, rural poverty and a lack of any local ownership rights
in wildlife that might encourage local conservation measures (WSRTF, 1995).
These trends, coupled with the growing influence of foreign donors, forced
Tanzania to re-examine its conventional centralized wildlife management
approach. In 1998, a new wildlife policy was approved which called for devolving
management rights and control over benefits from wildlife outside protected
areas, such as revenue from tourist hunting concessions, to rural communities
(MNRT, 1998).
Actors within the tourism industry also responded to existing conservation
challenges in ways that both contributed to and fed off of the policy reform
movement of the 1990s. In the country's ecologically rich northern savannahs,
wildlife was under pressure from land use changes, as investment in agriculture
and land sales picked up following liberalization (Igoe and Brockington, 1999).
Wildlife in savannah parks such as the Serengeti and Tarangire moves across
much larger landscapes, often migrating over 50km between wet and dry season
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