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dam-l Malawi Lake rehabilitation/LS
>From Africa News Online:
Campaign To Rehabilitate Lake Chilwa Underway
June 28, 1999
Raphael Tenthani, PANA Correspondent
BLANTYRE, Malawi (PANA) - Denmark has unveiled a 72,893,205 kwacha (about
two million US dollars) to rehabilitate Lake Chilwa's
10,426 square km of wetland and catchment area.
DANIDA, the Danish aid agency in charge of the project, Monday said it is
aimed at developing the area surrounding the salt lake to prevent
surrounding communities from encroaching onto the wetland and catchment
area which affect water levels in the lake.
It said the project will develop natural resources to be utilised
sustainably by the 60,162 inhabitants in the 335 villages surrounding the
lake.
The third largest lake in the country, Chilwa is situated in the southern
district of Zomba on the Mozambican border.
The lake, an inland drainage body of water which sometimes dries up due to
unprotected surroundings, covers a total of 2,047 square km of
wetland of which 143 square km is used for rice cultivation. Its catchment
area covers some 8,349 square km.
With an average of 1.5-metre in depth, although its deepest points exceed 5
metres, Chilwa annually yields some 17,000 metric tonnes of fish
which fetches between up to 3.4 million US dollars.
As a tourist attraction, the lake boasts of more than 161 bird species and
41 palearctic migrant bird species, bringing a total bird population in
excess of 350,000.
To achieve sustainable resource utilisation, according to the project
document, the rehabilitation is intended to ''increase capacity for wetland
and
natural resource management among district personnel, extension staff and
selected communities'' around the lake.
The document, however, envisages environmental hiccups like reduction in
water levels, degradation of the catchment area, soil erosion, siltation
of the wetland, water pollution by agro-chemicals, invasion of exotic
predatory species to its natural inhabitants and overtrapping and shooting
of
birds.
The document says a separate component of the project will be set aside to
control these hiccups.
The first phase of the project, which comes in the wake of Malawi becoming
a signatory of the Ramsar Convention which is aimed at conserving
wetlands and shallow water lakes under threat, will end in March 2000 while
the second phase starts April 2000 and ends in September 2003.
This site is part of AFRICA NEWS ONLINE.
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Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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