CHANGEMAKERS Emmanuel Koro

Emmanuel Koro

Emmanuel Koro Johannesburg-based international award-winning environmental journalist who has written extensively on environment and development issues in Africa.

Western Celebration of African Poverty

What the book is all about and why I wrote it

This book focuses on one of the most frustrating realities in Africa. The continent is resourcerich but poor. Despite Africa’s poverty challenges, the book illustrates glimpses of povertyreducing possibilities in rural southern Africa, under the programme called Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). The CBNRM initiative enables rural communities to benefit from wildlife. It is a mind-set changing development approach, the benefits of which have transformed former poachers into absolute wildlife conservationists. It has made very traditional communities that used to resist family planning, embrace it, in order to avoid overpopulation that would displace wild animals from land set aside for wildlife conservation.

Eugene Lapointe (President at IWMC World Conservation Trust, Former Secretary General at CITES).

The former UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Secretary-General (1982 -1990) and Switzerlandbased IWMC-World Conservation Trust President, Eugene Lapointe, endorsed the book in the foreword: “Western Celebration of African Poverty has something for everyone who cares about wildlife, wild places and human dignity in the developing world,” said Eugene. “I cannot recommend this book highly enough.”

Western Celebration of African Poverty is available from retailers, book stores and Amazon: www.amazon.com/WesternCelebration-African-Poverty-Animalebook/dp/B084JNRZTN

Why I wrote the book

I wrote this book in order to truthfully tell Africa who and what are blocking it from implementing successful conservation and development initiatives that benefit the wellbeing of both its people and wildlife.

I want all Africans and friends of Africa to know that it is outsider influence that continues to scandalously block any scientifically justified grounds for African countries to benefit from their wildlife use through trade.

I call these trade bans unjustified trade sanctions, which have laughably failed to save a single rhino and elephant! The ban on rhino horn and ivory is in force but the media is awash with rhino and elephant poaching, including illegal trade in these products. When an experiment fails, an alternative should be sought. Those alternatives include wildlife hunting, and international trade in rhino horn and ivory.

I would like every African to stop being brainwashed into poverty by those who unjustifiably ban trade in our wildlife and its products. We are nobody’s experiment. Trade, not aid, will save African people and their wildlife from poverty and extinction, respectively.

Emmanuel Koro can be reached at emmanuelkoro96@yahoo.com

“Trade, not aid, will save African people and their wildlife from poverty and extinction, respectively.”

African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana).

Photo © Villiers Steyn