IT REALLY IS ABOUT THE BIRDS AND THE BEES: NATURE AND SUSTAINABILITY IN TAITA TAVETA COUNTY.
Taita Taveta is a beautiful county close to the Kenyan coast that forms part of the Tsavo ecosystem. It is home to a unique array of wildlife such as elephant, giraffe, and zebra and has a wide range of antelopes, birds and monkeys. Tsavo National Park, the largest park in Africa is located in Taita County. It was set aside as a national park because it was considered unsuitable for agriculture and human settlement because of being very arid, the presence of trypanosomiasis and wildlife.
Managing wildlife has become increasingly more expensive for our government because of growing pressure on land and natural resources by the neighboring human settlements. The need for a wise natural resource management strategy in the county highlights the fact that wildlife management is not just about protecting wildlife from poachers and limiting the encroachment of farmers and agricultural activities into the National Parks and conservation areas, but also about protecting farms and inhabitants from wildlife damage in wildlife dispersal areas. How do we respond to the needs of local communities sharing the ecosystem with wildlife? Resource conflicts point toward the fact that human-wildlife conflicts are a conservation as well as development issue.
A 2004 study by James Njogu of the Amsterdam Research Institute for Global Issues and Development Studies, found that most traditional management systems in the past involved environmental management to the extent that the development of what are today’s indigenous institutional structures reflect the way the communities organized their lives in ecological settings. Today, community-based wildlife and forest conservation initiatives have taken the place of traditional ethnic-based, resource management systems. Today’s programs are mostly crisis-driven and have been initiated by stakeholders, such as NGOs, with government assuming the management role.
In his book, “Natural Enemies: People-wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective” John Knight professor of anthropology at the Queens University in Belfast, writes that human wildlife conflicts usually arise from territorial proximity, reliance on the same resources or threats to human livelihoods and safety. But our solutions have the tendency to be limited to those that benefit animals whenever we examine the conflict between humans and animals in ecology and conservation our solutions.
The Taita Hills in Kenya are considered part the Eastern Arc biodiversity hotspot. The area is part of a global biodiversity hotspot and is part of the Tanzania-Malawi Mountains Endemic Bird Area. It has been suggested that as much as a third of the flora of the forest regions of Eastern Kenya and Tanzania is endemic to this hotspot. The top of the Taita hills were once covered by dense montane forest. The land around the hills is intensely cultivated with almost no natural habitat all the way to the flanks of the hills. Because of many decades of cultivation, the forests of the Taita Hills survive as fragmented patches on hilltops – islands in an agricultural sea. These patches include some large portions of Mbololo along a hillcrest, Sagalla and Kasigau. These forests are home to numerous rare and endemic plants and animals. The Taita Hills are also home to other endemics including several birds, butterflies and amphibians.
The Taita African violet (Saintpaulia teitensis)), is endemic to Mbololo Forest in the Eastern Arc global biodiversity hotspot. The Taita African Violet is pollinated in its natural habitat by a limited number of bee species from a single genus. The limited number of bee species involved suggests a more specialized pollination system. The limited numbers of bee species available to pollinate this Eastern Arc endemic indicates that the conservation of specialized interactions is just as crucial as that of protecting individual species and habitats. Forest fragments on the Taita Hills hold the only known wild populations of this plant globally. Most pollinators are wild insects and forest insects at that.
Protecting species rich habitats protects these pollinators, thereby helping to improve food security and rural livelihoods. Only 1.7 % of Kenya remains forested and this is where most of these pollinators live. Food crops that benefit from the pollination of these wild insects include amongst others pigeon peas, pumpkins, passion fruits eggplant, avocado, coffee, cowpeas, mangoes, okra, and tomatoes. And it is these insect pollinators who directly influence the quality of these vital food crops. For example, fruits and vegetables rich in color are a direct result of the amount of pollination that has taken place. The color, flavor and seed quantity of papayas are the direct results of the amount of pollen that’s been deposited on the frequent visits to the female papaya tree. Other plants need the same kind of frequent visits by pollinators to get the depth of flavor, color and seeds.
The focus on the conservation of the Eastern Arc forests and the issue of sustainable development in the region, as well as the unique relationship between Amegilla bees and the Taita African Violet all emphasize the importance of conserving forest fragments for this flagship endangered species. Strong (inter)national concern for wildlife can lead to the estrangement of local people (who are in fact stakeholders) from the wildlife in question. If wildlife is seen as being useful to people they will conserve it. This is a time to learn our natural resource heritage in order to properly steward it and benefit from it. We urgently need to discover the links between humans and nature at a time when this link is disappearing at a phenomenal rate.
Njogu’s study found that the local communities felt alienated from their natural resources, because they were not granted any opportunity to use them or participate in their management despite a push by NGOs or the government. In terms of forest use, the local communities argue that non-residents or non-Taita have been the beneficiaries of these forest areas. These outsiders conspire with government officers, who are supposed to protect the forest. The local communities have no rights over these forests, which the local Taita consider as part of their ancestral resources. Nature conservation is probably not the first thing in local peoples´ minds when there is lack of land, energy and income. If the county is to be able to benefit from the bounty nature has to offer a leadership that has a long range view of development needs to fill the gap that is being highlighted in the natural resource management issues the county is experiencing.