World-renowned for its abundant exotic wildlife, rolling savannah and luxury safari camps, Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve is under threat from its fame.
The site of the annual “great migration”, the Maasai Mara and neighbouring Tanzania’s Serengeti plains, were recently crowned by United States media the seventh “new wonder of the world”, but there are fears the honour may be a mixed blessing.
In Kenya, tourism and government officials are ecstatic with the designation — expected to spark a surge in US visitors — but share with conservationists concern that over-development of the reserve may lead to its destruction.
“As we celebrate, let us not lose sight of the challenge that this development presents, not only to this reserve but also to the tourism industry as a whole,” Kenyan Tourism and Wildlife Minister Morris Dzoro said.
To cope with rising numbers of safari-goers, up from lows in the tens of thousands in the late 1990s to about 300Â 000 a year presently, infrastructure in what is known locally as “the Mara” must be expanded and improved, he said.
There must be a “special focus on conserving this very unique wonder to posterity”, Dzoro said, noting the “seventh wonder” designation from the US television network ABC and USA Today newspaper will herald a boom in Americans.
It “will certainly put pressure on our already overstretched capacity”, he said on a recent tour of the reserve. “The key challenge is [the] need to increase and update our infrastructure on ground to meet the demand.”
But such steps endanger the Mara’s delicate eco-system, posing threats to the grasslands that support wildebeest, gazelle, antelope, zebra, elephant and giraffe that feed big-cat carnivores: lion, cheetah and leopard.
Aris Grammaticas, founder and managing director of the Mara’s exclusive Governor’s Camp, home base for the popular BBC television series Big Cat Diaries, is one of those who stands to benefit from the publicity.
He is also one of those most concerned about what a surge in visitors will mean.
“We in Kenya are receiving accolades for this beautiful game area, and, on the other hand, we are in danger of causing its destruction,” he said.
“We should be wary that the recognition just received by the Maasai Mara could encourage yet more uncontrolled and unplanned development to the further detriment of the area,” said Grammaticas.
“This is a strong signal to all of us that we now have a tremendous joint responsibility to the whole world to conserve this area.”
In mid-November, ABC’s popular Good Morning America breakfast show broadcast live from the Mara, to promote it and the Serengeti, to an estimated eight million US viewers as the “seventh wonder”.
The honour is pegged to the migration, or “cycle of life”, of more than 1,5-million wildebeest and zebra that plod from the Serengeti north into Kenya in search of pasture around the snaking Mara River every July and August.
Braving killer crocodiles that snatch the slow, weak or simply unlucky, their arrival and return in November have become a staple of television nature programmes and draw thousands of visitors to the Maasai Mara each year.
But the toll on the reserve from safari-goers has not only taxed its 1Â 200 square kilometre area, but strained a further 2Â 415 square kilometre supporting eco-system.
Already, part of the supporting eco-system has been turned to settlement areas and for cultivation, leaving about 1Â 600 square kilometres.
Inhabited mainly by the Maasai tribe, the land adjacent to the Mara has become critical to supporting the migration, which floods the reserve to capacity, yet is also key to human livelihoods.
“It is very important that the Maasai people living in the dispersal areas benefit from tourism,” said Grammaticas.
“Should they decide that their land could be put to a better and more profitable use, the wildebeest migration, one of the very last great animal migrations of the world, would cease,” he said.
Kenya Tourist Board chairperson Jake Grieves-Cook agrees.
“There is a serious danger that the area outside the reserve could be lost to a lot of shambas,” he said, referring to small farming plots on which the cattle-dependent Maasai graze their cattle.
Grieves-Cook explained how a group of Maasai land owners came together and moved their cattle to a different area to leave their land for wildlife instead of farming and formed a conservancy at the border of Maasai Mara.
“In that conservancy, this year for the first time, 150Â 000 wildebeest went there, a place that was full of cows a year ago,” he said.
“So, the community is better coming together, joining their land to form a single conservancy which would benefit them.” — AFP