The Sunday News
Rutendo Nyeve, Online Correspondent
THE five Partner States of the Kavango Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) have joined forces to defend their borders against wildlife crime, which deprives the region of its natural beauty and resources.
To this end, the initiative is conducting a training that seeks to improve capacity, synergy and effectiveness of customs and law enforcement agencies responsible for controlling movement of goods through all of the TFCA’s 33 ports of entry and exit.
The training, which runs from the 16 to 17 February in Livingstone, Zambia will enable the TFCA to make great strides in implementing the South African Development Community’s (Sadc) Law Enforcement and Anti-poaching Strategy (LEAP).
Countries that make up KAZA are Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Sadc LEAP focuses on reducing poaching and illegal trade in fauna and flora species as well as enhancing law enforcement capacity in the Sadc Region by 2021.
The KAZA TFCA spans an area of approximately 520 000 square kilometres and includes 36 proclaimed protected areas. With an abundance of biodiversity that includes Africa’s largest contiguous elephant population and the largest connected lion population in Southern Africa and with a multitude of transit routes, KAZA is a prime target of organized wildlife crime groups.
Executive Director of the KAZA Secretariat, Dr Nyambe Nyambe confirmed the training and said, “This project augments Sadc and KAZA aspirations to a multi-agency approach to combatting illegal trade in wildlife species. We are looking forward to the commencement of the training and the unique and strategic role that customs officials bring to the fight against illegal trade”
Traffickers exploit vulnerabilities in transportation and customs capability to move illegally sourced natural resources and Africa remains one of the major global source regions. In a cross-border landscape like KAZA, challenges are compounded by differences in permitting systems and regulations, the species that are protected, and the fines and sentences for different types of offences in each country – all providing potential loopholes for criminal syndicates to exploit. These variances can also undermine the integrity of the KAZA TFCA as strong penalties in one country may displace the problem of poaching and trafficking to neighbouring countries.
Combating Wildlife Crime Manager for Peace Parks, Doug Gillings, commended the collaborative approach of the KAZA Partner States.
“Custom officials are a primary line of defense against the illegal trafficking of our continent’s natural treasures. The capacitation and resourcing of customs officials is key to the disruption of trafficking. It is a significant achievement for five countries to come together to strengthen this important link in the law enforcement chain – collectively understanding their shared trafficking landscape, and initiating a process to crack down on illegal natural resource trafficking, together,” said Gillings.
The new collaboration in Combating Natural Resource Trafficking, works to address these threats by creating and implementing a Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) – common to all five countries, developing an accredited training curriculum for customs and other law enforcement officials, as well training such officials in the five Partner States. This curriculum has been accredited as a graduate level qualification. It will equip officials to effectively enforce CITES, state action plans, the newly produced common SOPs for application of CITES regulations, as well as engage in the efficient use of technical equipment to enhance efficiency.
Additional training will be provided in species identification to improve the capacity of these officials to respond to the challenges in their areas, effectively implementing CITES and improving the chances of intercepting trafficking. Furthermore, it will institutionalise and entrench procedures into the respective operations.
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