SCIENCE and safari hunting are the twin prongs in a plan to revive one of southern Africa's most valuable national parks, Gorongosa in war-ravaged Mozambique. British researchers this week begin a £2-million contract to mastermind the rehabilitation of the largest and most biologically diverse park in a country ranked by the World Bank as the world's poorest.
"But first we have to find what is there," says Phil O'Keefe, professor of geography of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a director of ETC International, the company running the project. The project, which he says will "dictate much of the environmental research at the university over the next five years", will draw up an inventory of animals in the derelict park, using transects to count droppings and native methods of tracking animals in the bush.
The long-term aim is to create not so much a natural wilderness as an economic ...
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