Elephants at the Selous Game Reserve, a World Heritage site. The Tanzania government intends to raze 35,532 hectares for a uranium mine. tanzaniatourguide.com [Sadly, the folks at Serengeti Watch were right: The road will be built anyway. From their Stop the Serengeti Highway Facebook page: “AS PREDICTED OUR WORK IS NOT OVER! ‘Construction of a road across Serengeti will go on as planned but the government says more than 120 kilometres cutting across world famous park will not be tarmacked’ (which is what they have always said).”]

By BILHAM KIMATI
30th June 2011 CONSTRUCTION of a road across Serengeti will go on as planned but the government says more than 120 kilometres cutting across world famous park will not be tarmacked. The Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, Mr Ezekiel Maige, told a news conference in Dar es Salaam on Thursday that the government has not completely shelved plans to construct a bitumen highway across the Serengeti, which is one of the seven heritage sites in the country. He said the decision followed the 35th Annual Session of the World Heritage Committee held in Paris between 19 and 29 June, that deliberated on heritage sites across the world. The move is expected to ease global outcry by conservationist who feared that the proposed highway would cause irreversible damage to the world heritage site. [Right.] Environmentalists had earlier argued that the road endanger the lives of two million wildebeests and zebra that annually cross over from Serengeti into the Masai Mara National Park in Kenya, forming the migration spectacle that attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists. “Tanzania presented two issues; one regarding construction of Serengeti road and extraction of uranium in the Selous Game Reserve,” Minister Maige explained. […] With regard to extraction of uranium in the Selous Game Reserve, Mr Maige said Tanzania requested for alteration of the Selous boundaries to have the 34,532 hectares with uranium deposits left out. The size of Selous is 5.12 million hectares. “The uranium deposit is within the heritage site. Extraction of the minerals required approval of two-thirds of the 21 World Heritage Committee members. Tanzania was granted what is known as referral approval, meaning that the applicant is granted permission with conditions,” he explained. […]

State reviews Serengeti tarmac road project