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Ugandan wildlife park threatened
Under the snow-capped peaks of the Mountains of the Moon, Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda might appear an untouched wilderness of forest and savannah.

Yet the human population of this supposed haven for wildlife outnumbers the elephants by about 50 to one.
  
Herdsmen tend their animals in Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. Their livestock are in competition with the wildlife for the grazing in the park
 
Eleven growing villages, with about 55,000 people in total, are dotted across the park.

Their inhabitants, whose presence is technically illegal, live by fishing and herding cattle. They have nowhere else to go because almost every inch of fertile land in the surrounding area has been taken and cultivated.

Uganda's population, already exceeding 30 million, will triple in the next four decades. A United Nations forecast suggests that by 2050, the country will have 93 million people.

If so, the park, which has carried the Queen's name after she opened its gates in 1954, risks being swamped.

Some 165,000 people will live inside by 2050 - and millions more nearby.

advertisementFar from being a pristine wilderness, the reserve will have a human population density of 200 per square mile.

The consequences for the wildlife could be disastrous. "The people will be forced by nature to grow food and cultivate here," said Ivan Masereka, 39, who lives inside the park in Katunguru village.

Katunguru's inhabitants co-exist uneasily with the wildlife.

Earlier this year, a lion killed one man on the edge of the village.

In theory, the park's rangers should have been summoned to shoot the animal.

But the villagers were so enraged that they killed the lion themselves. "It would be best if the park was not here," said Mr Masereka. "They should put all the animals in the zoo and leave this land to us."

Benon Mugyerwa, the acting chief warden, estimates that the park's human population has risen by a third in the past decade.

The rising tide of humanity inside Queen Elizabeth Park illustrates the population pressure on Africa as a whole.

Buried in the detail of UN forecasts are the essential figures showing why huge numbers of people in poor countries will have little choice but to migrate to the rich world. In total, the world's population is forecast to grow by 2.5 billion by 2050.

Almost half of this increase will take place in eight countries.

Two, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, already rely on the World Food Programme to keep millions of their people alive.

Their sharply rising populations suggest that this dependence will become even greater. Ethiopia's population of 83 million is projected to reach 183 million in 2050, while Congo's will rise from 62 million to 186 million.

The key question is whether the countries set to experience the steepest rise will be able to feed their vastly populations. If not, millions may have little choice but to migrate to rich countries, including Britain.

"Disaster and Armageddon have often been forecast before and it hasn't happened yet," said David Coleman, the professor of demography at Oxford University.

"But when you have such large population growth in countries which are pretty marginal at the best of times, can they possibly support populations three or four times greater than they have now?

"I don't see how they're going to do it.

Their capacity for radically restructuring their economies in order to allow for a larger population to be sustained is very questionable. It's all possible in theory, but I don't see at the moment how it's going to happen."
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/27/wuganda127.xml
 

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