Striking a balance between natural resource conservation in Africa and their traditional use by local populations is one of the greatest challenges in managing the continent’s national parks and other protected areas. In fact most national parks in Africa,while touted in the West for preserving scarce or endangered flora and fauna, are often regarded with resentment and uncertainty by local communities. In creating parks and reserves, many countries have forcibly removed entire villages from within their limits to new locations along their periphery. Traditional hunting, fishing, logging, and fruit gathering is often limited or even outright banned.

In Senegal, natural areas are managed by the Department of National Parks, a pseudo military organization staffed by wildlife experts and park agents who undergo military training and who are well armed not only to prevent poaching, but for national defense purposes as well. The Langue de Barbarie park along Senegal’s northern border with Mauritania, has a stock of automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades (RPG-7). With a war between Senegal and Mauritania only a decade old, this stockpile does not exist without precedent. Likewise, in the South of the country the Basse Casamance park, known for its thriving populations of monkeys and jaguar, has been closed to visitors for over a year as rebels in the region continue to wage a separatist “conflict” with the Senegalese military that has seen action in the park itself. Just this past summer, an American aid worker with the Red Cross who visited the park was killed by an antiperssonel landmine.

Rebellion and war, while serious threats in select areas, remain improbable scenarios in most of Senegal’s parks. Yet poaching and the everyday exploitation of resources for food, fuel, and medicine by local people persist as real challenges to park agents whose mandate is to protect biodiversity. At the Langue de Barbarie park, the situation is somewhat unique. Primarily a marine park created to protect populations of sea turtles and migratory birds in the Senegal River Delta, the ecosystem’s main threat is overfishing. But instead of forbidding fishing entirely, the Langue de Barbarie tolerates sustenance fishing by the local population. Unlike the commercial fishing that abounds off Senegal’s coast, sustenance fisherman bring home their take and sell their surplus to their neighbors. Everday, scenic expanses of the park are filled with dozens of fisherman along the river’s banks and in dugout canoes throwing their nets into picturesque waters.

At the park’s boundaries, small fishing camps have been set up along the beach where dozens of pirogues sit alongside one another before facing the waves and whitewater of the local sandbar to reach offshore fishing grounds. Here, catch limits do not exist and the piles of tuna, sharks, rays, eels, and other fruits de mer make obvious the distinction. The fisherman here know that within the park boudaries they cannot fill their nets as they can at the edges and their reactions to the regulations are mixed.
Some complain that the park benefits the toubabs, the white people only. They see its rules as an obstacle to an already precarious profession. Others think that the park is a good idea because it gives the fish a place to reproduce and grow. Still other fisherman within the park have adapted to the situation and now make money giving boat tours to tourists.

Surprisingly few however, mention the likely effects of the foreign commercial vessels, mostly Asian and European, that overshadow their artisanal Senegalese counterparts. The Senegalese government has sold lucrative offshore fishing rights to several countries hungry for the abundance of species on the West African coastline. Sadly, local fisherman and the population they feed may now be paying for it.

Africa’s protected areas and national parks may provide some indication of how developing countries deal with mounting pressures on natural resources. More mouths to feed and fewer fish to feed them is undoubtedly the trend places like Senegal will face in the years to come. An increase in deforestation coupled with the advance of the desert into sub-Saharan countries make the situation in Africa’s Sahel region that much more prescient. Parks and reserves may be able to stop local villagers from destroying vegetation or poaching sensitive species, but along their edges hungry people will continue to fish, hunt, and cut the wood they need to feed their families.