NATURE FORUM WORLDWIDE

Daan Vreugdenhil · Site Admin Joined: 27 Oct 2006 Posts: 48 Location: USA

Guinea Bissau, one of the poorest countries of the world, is the only one of the more than 80 countries that I have visited in my lifetime, where the capital does not have public light! And yet, when walking through the pitch black streets of Bissau on my way to a restaurant, I felt perfectly safe. One night, I a gentleman with a car noticed that I had been standing on the curbside for a while and asked me where I needed to go, not knowing that I was working for the World Bank and offered me a ride. As we chatted on our way, he asked me what I did in Guinea Bissau, and I told him that I was helping the government's national parks service, IBAP, with management plans and a financial analysis for a protected areas financing trust fund FUNDAÇÃO BIOGUINÉ. Enthusiastically the gentleman called out: Oh but then you are working with my dear friends Alfredo Da Silva and Justino Biai, the directors of IBAP. It turned out this gentleman was the Director General of Tourism of Guinea Bissau, who, seeing what he supposed was a tourist being lost, offered him a safe ride to the hotel. What a kind and friendly people live in this little country on the West Coast of Africa, clad with islands and mangroves!

And speaking of mangroves, two mini countries in the world are linked together as they jointly hosts more than 90% of the world population of the Black-tailed Godwit, Limosa Limosa, "Grutto" as the Dutch call this bird after its joyous call during the breeding season. In both countries the Black-tailed Godwit is heavily endangered for different reasons. In the Netherlands, modern meadow regimes don't give enough time to for the young Godwitsto mature and fly away from the mowing machines. Each year Dutch farmers unintentionally, but still..., turn young gruttos into minced meat. In the Netherlands, the Government spends tens of millions of Euros to subsidize the farmers to apply adapted management practices, so more young Gruttos may survive. But, Guinea Bissau is the other half of the equation for the survival of the Grutto. After the breeding season, almost the entire population of the Grutto lives in Guinea Bissau. In fact, that little country, is the second most important wintering area for European migrant birds in Africa, giving refuge to millions of birds during each Northern Winter.

In Guinea Bissau the situation on the one hand is much more difficult but on the other hand, the problems are so much easier to solve! The World Bank and GEF have financed 5 years of support to IBAP, the national parks service that protects all major wintering areas of the Grutto in about 10% of the territory of the country. But the project will come to an end in March 2010. In August 2011, the protected areas and national parks of Guinea Bissau will have no more field staff and everything that IBAP so carefully has built up, will be abandoned and in the day following the end of the project, it will all be looted! Why? If you are a ranger in GB and get double the minimum wage, you cant effort staying on your job without salary, because you have to support wife and children. So you abandon your park headquarters and return to your village. It does not take much imagination what will happen with the radios, generators, libraries, furniture, etc. once the headquarters and ranger stations in the park have been left without staff!

My dear friends Alfredo and Justino have been doing wonders with the limited finances and staff they have at their disposition! Everywhere, where I went, the local population is collaborating with IBAP and the flocks of birdare simply amazing. Poaching has not stopped but has been reduced significantly.

But March 2010, all this will come to an end and the protected areas will be used for other purposes, carefully trained and highly motivated staff will have to for other jobs, and the Grutto and millions of other European birds will be left to spontaneous processes of agricultural conversion of the wetlands.

It was my task to calculate a bare bare minimum need of staffing and financing of the protected areas system of Guinea Bissau. For a mere 1 million Euros per year IBAP can effectively manage all the protected areas, mostly being wetlands.

Well, given the importance of the Godwit for the Netherlands, I enthusiastically contacted the Dutch Embassy for Guinea Bissau, which is in Dakar, Sénégal. I assumed, that given he national priority of the Dutch Ministry for Agriculture and Nature Conservation to rescue the Godwit from extinction, I would receive an interested response from our Embassy. Can you imagine my surprise to get an email from the Embassy, advising me that as GB could not count on any support from the Dutch Government, that it was not interested in meeting with me on this topic. The Government of the Netherlands did not support Guinea Bissau given its political behaviour and policies in the past. Therefore there was no interest to talk with me. Now, I could understand the general policy towards a country that has not complied with the rather generous criteria for development cooperation of the Netherlands.

But I was not talking about general development cooperation; I was advising the Embassy about one of the Dutch national conservation priority programmes, the conservation of the rapidly declining Grutto, that just happened to depend for its survival on Guinea Bissau. But I could not make the Embassy understand the nature of my concerns. I was advised that it did see the need for me to make a stopover in Dakar to inform it about the conditions of the Godwit in its wintering grounds. Given the very little time available, I left it at that and in stead made a very brief stopover in the Netherlands, to explain my concerns on the survival of the Grutto to the Dutch conservation organisations.

To demonstrate the concern among the main stakeholders in the Netherlands: I was received at a very short notice by the director of Natuurmonumenten, Jan Jaap de Graaff, the president of the Waddenvereniging, Ellen Hey, the director of the WWF (WNF), Johan van de Gronden, Bernd de Bruin of Vogelbescherming (Birdprotection) and my good friend Gerard van Dijk of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Nature Conservation, whothat day was to leave to on international travel and still made time available for a briefing.

The private conservation world in the Netherlands without exception showed great interest in my findings and shared my concerns that in this case, no more research assistance could actually safe the Godwit. Only the continued jobs of park rangers and a small team of senior management staff of the National Parks Service of Guinea Bissau can continue to protect this little bird that calls out the joyous victorous cry of spring in the meadows of the Netherlands.

So here we have the situation, that the Netherlands spends I don't know how many tens of millions of Euros per year to protect 90% of the Grutto population within its borders during its breeding season, but then fails to dash out the less than one million Euros necessary to make sure that the birds survive during the winter season.

In collaboration between the major hosts of all of the migrant birds in Guinea bissau, the Scandinavian countries, The UK, the Netherlands and Germany, a rescue operation might even be divided proportianally among those countries. If each dipspin with just a few 100 dollars per year all those millions of migrant birds would do just fine and live in harmony with those wonderful people in Guinea Bissau. But as corruption by previous governments in Guinee Bissau have violated the trust of the donors of development aid the Northern countries chose to abandon be oblivious of their own migratory bird populations, and of course also of the incredibly poor people of Guinea Bissau, who did not commit the corruption, but who are victim to it.

Millions of the European migrants cant be given the protection they need to survive the winter. Therefore they are at risk to severely diminish in numbers while in the case of the Grutto, total disappearance from the face of the Earth lures at the horizon. NO MORE JOYOUS GRUTTOOOOO GRUTTOOOOO GRUTTOOOOO, the famous spring salute in the Dutch meadows from April to July ever to be heard again........... because

Or do I think to simplistically?

I just simply refuse to give up. It just can't come and may not come this far and will work with the World Bank team looking for solutions. If you have contacts, that can help potential financers, or have other suggestions (no more studies please, there are enough studies to know the importance of GB for European migrant birds), please contact me or post a message with suggestions, or simply a support to let the Government of the Netherlands know that you want it to provide financial support for the staffing of IBAB, so that it can continue to safely host this lovely bird, the Grutto!

You can also make a financial contribution at Adopt A Ranger (see link below), and refer in your donation: Safe the Godwit!, which will help pay for the salaries of park rangers.
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Dr. Ir. Daan Vreugdenhil
Please visit: http://www.birdlist.org/site/why_birds.htm and
http://www.adopt-a-ranger.org
as well as our beautiful pictures at:
http://www.nature-worldwide.info/phpbb/album.php

Bernd de Bruijn

We much support your plight and commend your choice of using Black-tailed Godwit to illustrate both the importance of conservation along flyways, and the unbalance in priorities and budgets between northern and southern countries. A very similar approach is taken by Vogelbescherming Nederland (VBN) and BirdLife International to underline the fact that conservation is an international issue, in their Flyway Campaign. Additionally, it should not fail to ring a bell in our own Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. We have been arguing for a long time that the (huge!) budgets to support Dutch farmers for Godwit conservation are currently not achieving their goal. Not money, but the way it is spent is the limiting factor here.

Another good illustration of birds linking up our countries is our Purple Heron satellite tracking project (www.vogelbescherming.nl/purperreiger). Dutch breeding birds use marshes and rice fields in Guinea-Bissau to spend the northern winter. (Website will soon be in English and French too, but the google earth maps are universal!).

Guinea-Bissau is a partner country of VBN, where we work with the Bissau branch of Wetlands International and the national network ODZH. We are able to support their work for wetland conservation - in turn backed by our memberbship of over 144,000 which shows that there is a real interest and support for this work in our country.

We are very concerned about the situation regarding IBAP. Guinea-Bissau is a country where there is still lot of nature (and traditional rice culture for godwits and others!) to conserve, for the benefit of not only nature itsself, but for people as well. Especially with the recent World Bank support, IBAP is set to play a major role in this. This boost should not be allowed to be turned into dissappointment.

Bernd de Bruijn
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Vogelbescherming Nederland is a partner of BirdLife International - Together for birds and people.