Tanzania scraps Serengeti highway plan

Tanzania has withdrawn a controversial plan to build a highway through the iconic Serengeti National Park, the United Nations' cultural organisation UNESCO said Saturday. Campaigners against the project however warned that the battle to kill off the project had not yet been conclusively won and warned that the government was looking at an alternative route. "The World Heritage Committee has received assurance on the part of the Tanzanian government that the highway project is abandoned," an official at the UN's education, science and culture organisation told AFP. "The committee has therefore decided not to list the site on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites because the threat has disappeared," the official added. Tanzania's government HAD said the proposed road would link some remote under-developed communities to larger hubs and HAD argued the country needed to start caring for its people as much as it did for its wildlife. But critics said it would destroy one of the planet's greatest natural spectacles and lobbied hard against the project. Serengeti Watch, an organisation committed to preserving the Serengeti's ecosystem, warned the battle against the highway project had not yet been won. "We do not consider this the final word in the Serengeti Highway saga by any means," the group said on its website. The Serengeti Highway was intended to link Musoma, on the banks of Lake Victoria, to Arusha, cutting through a swathe of park into which giant herds of wildebeest crowd every summer to seek Kenya's pastures. The project's critics argued the road would achieve just the contrary of what it set out to do by destroying a key tourist attraction and thus stripping local communities of their jobs. Serengeti Watch said the government was considering a highway that would wrap around the southern tip of the protected areas. It quoted a letter it said had been written by Tanzania's Natural Resources and Tourism Minister Ezekiel Maige. Instead of cutting through the park towards Arusha, this new road would run "south of Ngorongoro Conservation area and Serengeti National Park," according the letter. AFP was nor able Saturday to check the authenticity of this letter with the Tanzanian government. Last year, 27 biodiversity experts co-signed a statement published in Nature magazine arguing that building a road through the park would cause an environmental disaster.