Mozambique: Aurora Malene elected President of the Gorongosa Restoration Project.
Wildlife Conservation Society Twitter / Mozambique's environmental police officer
A total of 208 poachers were arrested in conservation areas in the central Mozambican province of Tete between 2014 and the first quarter of this year. In addition, a hundred homemade weapons, ammunition, and poison used to kill animals were seized.
Poachers are putting poison in water sources to kill elephants in the Magoe National Park. The poachers then extract the tusks from the dead or dying elephants for sale of ivory through the black market.
A regional seminar being held in Tete city on poaching and the illegal trade in wildlife products, which ends on Friday, heard that most of the poaching takes place along the borders with Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The districts that are worst affected by the crime are Magoe, Cahora Bassa (bordering Zimbabwe), Chifunde (bordering Zambia and Malawi), and Zumbo (bordering Zimbabwe and Zambia).
The WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF) appealed to communities to engage in the surveillance and denunciation of poaching to conserve species that are on the road to extinction due to their high commercial, economic and environmental value.
WWF considers that Mozambique is in a critical situation with some of its wildlife under threat of extinction due to poaching.
In June, authorities expressed the fear that an increase in poaching may lead to the extinction of elephants in the park. The Tete Provincial Director of Land, the Environment and Rural Development, Filipe Duarte, revealed that poachers killed 29 elephants in the park in 2015, compared with 25 in 2014.
Leave a Reply
Be the First to Comment!
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.