It has been announced that the first international Conservation and Tourism Investment Forum will be held in Uganda from this Friday, October 6.
A statement released by President Yuweri Museveni in Entebbe said the Forum would be a unique opportunity to harness the financial muscle of the world’s leading hotel and lodge chains to raise funds for conservation in general and Uganda’s wildlife in particular.
President Museveni is one of the founding presidents of ‘The Giant’s Club’, along with the leaders of Kenya, Gabon and Botswana, an organisation dedicated to the conservation of Africa’s giants like elephants and rhinos.
Three of the top Western food producing companies have been accused of colluding in the destruction of large parts of the surviving rain forest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The Rainforest Action Network says the food giants, which between them produce foods and beverages that are in all our homes much of the time, are destroying the last habitat of elephants, rhinos, tigers and orangutans to make way for palm oil plantations.
The Network says the destruction of the Leusar eco-system on Sumatra means the destruction of the last place where these four iconic species co-exist and has called for urgent international action to stop it.
A while back I wrote about an elephant ‘canteen’ that the authorities had created in south western China, basically, an area cleared of alien vegetation and replaced by shrubs and trees favoured by elephants, the idea being to limit contact between elephants and farmers.
Well, Indian conservationists are working on a similar project. The first forest reserves in India were declared by the British back in the 1920s, creating a network of protected forests across the country, and the new government of India took over the project on independence in 1947.
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Now, the national Ministry of Forestry and Conservation in New Delhi has announced a further step in the Green India Project, revealing that about 5 000 saplings of trees like mango, jackfruit and papaya are ready to be planted out in forests where there are elephants.
Apart from providing the elephants’ favourite foods, they are also going to dig wells deep in the forests, all part of a plan to avoid as much elephant/human contact as possible.
And finally, a tea plantation in India has become the first worldwide to be given an elephant friendly tag for its tea.
The Tenzing Bodosa Plantation on the Bhutan border in India’s north eastern Assam state, has been given the Elephant Friendly Certified Tea mark of approval by the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network and the University of Montana in the United States as part of a fund-raising drive for the conservation of Asian elephants.
It’s understood that tea plantations in Sri Lanka and Kenya are very interested in the project.
Source: Save the Eles News Service
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