| Bugs to the rescue |
| Posted by Enviroadmin |
| Monday, 24 May 2010 19:28 |
|
In the tropics, insects are a fact of life to be reckoned with. Not only do they carry human and livestock diseases but they pose a great risk to food production, often causing the loss of entire crops and destroying about half of all harvested food in storage. Yet their industrious energies can also be harnessed to provide alternative livelihoods for people who otherwise have no choice but to rely on natural resources from overstretched ecosystems. Unsustainable harvesting of plants and gathering wood for construction and fuel can have a devastating effect on ecosystems that are already on the point of collapse. Communities living near threatened forest fragments in the Eastern Afromontane and the Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa Biodiversity Hotspots are now producing brilliantly colored butterflies and beetles, organic honey, and raw silk with the help of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE). The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), administered by Conservation International, is supporting the project as part of its effort to increase the ability of local populations to benefit from, and contribute to, biodiversity conservation – one of its strategies for the region. "In the world of insects and other arthropods, which comprise 75 percent of all forms of life on Earth, less than 1 percent of the known species are pests," ICIPE's Ian Gordon says. "Farming those with lucrative spin-offs is an obvious route to sustainability in threatened areas." Connectivity between the forest patches at all three project sites – in Kenya's Taita Hills and Lower Tana River Forest and in the Amani Nature Reserve in Tanzania's East Usambara Mountains – is critically low. This threatens a range of remarkable species including the endemic, Critically Endangered Taita thrush (Turdus helleri), the Critically Endangered Tana River red colobus (Procolobus rufomitratus), and the 111 threatened species found in the East Usambaras. Working through local partners, ICIPE has so far trained about 170 people in beekeeping and silkworm farming in communities around two of the larger Taita Hills forest reserves, and in the villages of Hewani, Wema, and Vumbwe near the Tana River. Groups from an additional nine villages in the East Usambaras are working with the Tanzanian Forest Conservation Group's Amani Butterfly Farm on the project. "In the Taitas, butterfly farming has been the most successful part of the project to date," explains James Mwang'ombe of the East African Wildlife Society, ICIPE's local partner. "Within six months of start-up, farmers started exporting pupae in May 2006. After just six weeks they have brought in about $180." ICIPE has included endemic butterflies among the farmed species such as Cymothoe teita and Papilio desmondi teita to showcase the area's biodiversity, and has successfully run trials on Dasylepis integra and Toddalia asiatica as their respective larval food plants. Toddalia is used in traditional medicine and its sharp thorns also make it ideal for live fencing to keep in livestock. In conventional, commercial silk production, the domesticated moth Bombyx mori is used and each one spins about a mile of filament that is wound together to form yarn and then woven into raw silk. "But the Bombyx moths are Chinese in origin," Gordon says. "So to complement local biodiversity, we are also pioneering wild silk farming using African species such as Gonometa and the beautiful Argema. They produce a rougher raw silk but ICIPE is developing methods of processing it which will meet buyers' standards." Plant-based enterprises are also now getting off the ground under the same project. Thirty people have been trained in growing and processing neem (Azadirachta indica), used for a variety of medicinal, cosmetic, pesticidal, and agricultural products. An indigenous medicinal plant Ocimum kilimandscharicum, known locally as mfuto, is used for treating colds, flu, coughs, abdominal pains, and as an anti-malarial. Once ICIPE completes training in all the business areas, and pilot enterprises are up and running, local people can apply for small grants to establish their own businesses from a fund managed by the Eastern Africa Regional Programme Office of the World Wide Fund for Nature, and financed by CEPF. "Increasing the ability of local populations to benefit from and contribute to biodiversity conservation is a major part of our funding in the hotspot," CEPF Grant Director John Watkin says. "So we've coordinated our grant making to cover research, implementation, and communicating what is happening here. The BBC are making a documentary, and we hope that will help to boost demand for these products." ICIPE has an established customer base for their products in Kenya and is beginning to export these products to markets all over the world. As this continues, perhaps many more who live alongside the highly threatened forest fragments of East Africa will echo the words of Ngolo Duwe, a butterfly farmer in the Taita Hills, as he collected his first pay packet: "Leo watu wangu lazima wale chapati. (Today my family will eat bread)." The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund is a joint initiative of Conservation International, the Global Environment Facility, the Government of Japan, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the World Bank. As one of the founding partners, CI administers this global grant-making program that seeks to enable conservation action by partners and build capacity for sustainability. CEPF has provided support to more than 600 partners working to conserve biodiversity hotspots, the Earth’s biologically richest and most endangered regions. http://www.conservation.org/xp/CIWEB/partners/alliances/icipe.xml |
