Translated from French by an automated online translation service, so please excuse the roughness. See link for original. Thank you to Anne Dillon for volunteering her time to find these French articles and doing the online translating.
The Once Abundant Wildlife has Largely Disappeared
The rehabilitation project of protected areas (PAs), funded by UNDP, FAO, UEMOA, and the government, has been provisionally suspended after the violence that occurred Friday and Saturday in the town of Mango (592 km from Lomé), which left five dead.
The head of state made this decision during a crisis meeting. The authorities will await the outcome of the judicial investigation initiated after the incidents and initiate discussions with residents about the need to protect nature.
The project is implemented in several localities of the northern region and covers an area of ??over 179,000 hectares. But residents of the 38 villages concerned consider that the protection of fauna will deprive them of their farming activities and they risk expulsion.
In the Oti-Mandouri Wildlife and National Park adjacent Keran, the limits of PA are not respected, and local communities have invaded them to cultivate, graze livestock, and install villages, destroying habitats with operating unsustainable.
Conflicts between wildlife, farmers, and ranchers get worse, exacerbated by the additional pressure from transhumance [seasonally migrating] populations and livestock, as well as climate change. The once abundant wildlife of these two PA, whose grouping forms the Oti-Keran-Mandouri complex (OKM), has largely disappeared.
This threatens the biodiversity of the regional ecosystem, as these sites are part of traditional migration corridors for elephants and other large mammals. It seems important to reverse the trend by re-establishing a protected area while helping neighboring communities to launch natural resource management activities and new sustainable income-generating activities.