In its battle to remain afloat, Air Tanzania Corporation Limited (ATCL), has announced plans to recapture its lost routes and introduce new African and transcontinental destinations.

So far, it has been Tanzanian government subsidy that has kept the airline alive. According to Apolinari Tairo of eTN, ATCL’s chairman Mustapha Nyanganyi said the cash-strapped 30-year-old airline bounced back to its original 197 ticket stock numbered to comply with the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

Starting Jul 17, 2007, the airline will be issuing e-tickets and ATCL’s other targets will be leasing and later on buying its own aircraft through bank loans.

ATCL was created in 1977 when the East African Airways (EAA), once owned jointly by the three Eastern African states of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, was broken up. The airline has been financialll troubled since 2004, when it posted a loss of over $7.3 million. Compared to Kenya Airways, ATCL has been crippled with no more than three old Boeing 737s in its fleet.

The land of Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park and Usangu Game Reserve are going to be combined into one National Park.

“One of the aims of the government in annexing Usangu to Ruaha is in part to save the biodiversity of that area, as well as to increase tourism to the region,” said Gerald Bigurube, Director General, Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA). “This can best be accomplished if the area is administered and marketed by TANAPA”.

“Tanzania’s tourism strategy is to encourage high quality, low volume tourism,” said Peter Mwenguo, Managing Director, Tanzania Tourist Board. “By increasing the number of national parks, we are able to create more diversity in the safari circuits and avoid mass tourism.”

Ruaha has the largest population of elephants of any East African national park — about 10,000 animals. Other creatures calling Ruaha home include impala, waterbuck and other antelopes, lions, cheetahs and more than 450 bird species. The park is bounded the East by the Great Ruaha River. The natural water reservoir for the river is the Ihefu Wetland, which is located in the Usangu Game Reserve.

“Tanzania is constantly working on upgrading its game reserves to National Parks,” said Bigurube. “In a National Park there is no consumptive use of resources and this allows for the multiplicity of species, increasing the wildlife in the parks.”

For more information about Ruaha National Park, visit www.tanzaniaparks.com/ruaha.htm.

“Expanded budgets and antipoaching patrols since the mid-1980s have significantly reduced poaching and allowed populations of buffalo, elephants and rhinoceros to rebuild,” states the authors of a paper published in today’s issue of Science.

This technique has been used since the 1930s to estimate the abundance of fish. Now, a recent study has proved for the first time that enforcement patrols are effective at reducing poaching of elephants, African buffaloes and black rhinos in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

“Wildlife within protected areas is under increasing threat from the bushmeat and illegal trophy trades,” says Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and lead author of a paper, “and many argue that enforcement within protected areas is not sufficient to protect wildlife. Some say the $2 million spent annually in the Serengeti on patrols would be better spent on other preventive activities.”

However, his research proves otherwise. “The animals are ‘telling’ us poaching is down now that there are 10 to 20 patrols a day compared to the mid-1980s when there might be 60 or fewer patrols a year.” Hilborn says.

Previously, estimates of poaching have been difficult to verify. Therefore, Hilborn and his co-authors used the decades-old technique of catch-per-unit-of-effort, which has been to estimate fish abundance and set fishing limits.

The Serengeti has a 50-year-record of arrests and patrols. To estimate the amount of poaching, the paper’s authors divided the number of poachers arrested by the number of patrols a day, assuming that arrests per patrol were representative of poaching intensity.

“We show that a precipitous decline in enforcement in 1977 resulted in a large increase in poaching and decline of many species,” Hilborn and his co-authors wrote.

A press release announcing these findings stated:

The work marks the first time anyone has been able to reconstruct a history of poaching going back as far as 50 years, says Tom Hobbs, professor of ecology at Colorado State University and who is not affiliated with the work being published in Science.”The Hilborn team has shown that protection of wildlife by active enforcement of laws and regulations remains an essential tool for conserving biological diversity,” Hobbs says. “This sounds so simple, but it has been controversial.”

The National Science Foundation funded, at least in part, the research.

My very first post to this blog mentioned the this was coming. Now it is a reality.

Apolinari Tairo, from eTN Africa, reports that “Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda have launched a common marketing strategy at big international tourism fairs.” This is part of their effort to ” to market East Africa as a single package but with different and unique tourist heritages in each member state.”

The official start of this new campaign will coincide with the International Tourism Exhibition (ITB) in Berlin to be held in March of next year. There, East African tourist boards will present leaflets and banners featuring the regional tourist attractions and inter-state heritages.

In addition to this marketing campaign, the three countries have “also agreed on a common tourist visa and standardization of hotels and other tourist facilities in the region.”

According to Tairo, representatives from the regional tourist boards met at the recently-ended World Travel Market (WTM) in London, and “agreed to harmonize policies and strategies in the tourist sector in the East African Community (EAC) states to involve a broad spectrum of stakeholders.”

The managing director of the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) Peter Mwenguo told eTN Thursday, that they intend to “chat out plans to work out implementation of the EAC council of ministers directive requiring us to foster regional cooperation in tourism.”

Tairo adds, “Wildlife is the leading tourist attraction in East Africa, but each state has its own unique attractions including Mount Kilimanjaro, Ngorongoro Crater and Chimpanzee parks (Tanzania), the Maasai-Mara Game Reserve and the Indian Ocean beaches (Kenya) and gorilla heritage and natural scenery (Uganda).”

Thursday, Oct. 26, is World Tourism Day, and to celebrate Tanzania is opening a new tourist region of Kagera on the shores of Lake Victoria.

The Kagera region lies close to the equator (1 degree south) and has been rising as a tourist destination in Tanzania. The region includes diverse cultural and historical attractions and rich wildlife resources.

Kagera also shares territorial borders with Rwanda and Uganda, with a large part of its area sharing Lake Victoria water resources, which, in turn, shares borders with Kenya and Uganda. Lake Victoria is the largest tropical lake in the world and the second largest freshwater lake on Earth.

The opening is part of a week-long tourism promotion, the inauguration of Kagera Annual Cultural Festival and the World Tourism Day. Activities will focus on poverty reduction strategies, contribution to reconciliation of people’s culture, economic benefits of tourism and environmental protection.

For more information, visit www.kagera.org/worldtourismday.htm.