UAE hunting royals threaten Tanzania’s Serengeti

This video is called Serengeti – Great Migration & River Crossings in Tanzania, part 1.

From CorpWatch Blog:

Serengeti Under Threat from UAE Big Game Hunting Company

By Pratap Chatterjee

August 20th, 2012

Serengeti national park is under threat from Ortello Business Corporation (OBC) in a deal that could displace 48,000 indigenous Maasai and open it up for hunting of lions and leopards. An urgent action by Avaaz, an international campaigning group, has gathered close to a million signatures to protest the scheme.

The Serengeti region covers 12,000 square miles (30,000 square kilometers) from north Tanzania to south western Kenya. Over 2,000 lions roam the area among dozens of other species from crowned eagles to elephants and rare black rhinos. It is most famous for an annual migration during which over a million wildebeest and about 200,000 zebras travel south from the northern hills to the southern plains in October and November and then move west and north between April and June.

The region is also called Maasailand, after the semi-nomadic indigenous community that lived there for centuries until the British colonialists started to grab their lands to build ranches. Today the colorfully dressed spear carrying tribe have become a global tourist attraction.

“(O)ur vision of virgin nature has encouraged the takeover of the land by a new breed of super-rich conservationists and tourism operators,” writes New Scientist journalist Fred Pearce in his new book, The Land Grabbers. “The Serengeti has become the world’s biggest zoo, in which the Maasai warriors are reduced to decorative walk-on parts.”

One of these operators is OBC, which is based in the United Arab Emirates, and markets big game safaris. The company prefers not to speak to the media but a Conde Nast Traveler reporter sketched a profile of the company and its recent conflicts with the local Maasai.

See also here.