Professor Johan du Toit, says wildlife populations have been overhunted in Zimbabwe after farms were handed over to black Zimbabweans.
He warned that the country's black rhinos, one of the species that attracts high-spending foreign tourists and hunters, is at great risk right now, faced with the spectre of extinction.
But he believes international help could avert the disaster.
Professor du Toit, director of the Mammal Research Unit, says commercial white-owned farms in Zimbabwe were home to many rare large mammals, including cheetah, black rhino and sable – a type of antelope.
"White-owned commercial farmland and ranchland in Zimbabwe supported a very significant proportion of the country's biodiversity. It has been severely impacted after land was thrown over to subsistence agriculture."
The Zimbabwe Government insists that prior to the agrarian revolutiion only about 30 percent of white-owned land was actually used for farming, the minister of Environment Francis Nhema said, dismissing the findings..
But the professor dismisses this, saying most of the arable land was cultivated, while the rest supported indigenous woodland that was used for grazing cattle, or for wildlife, or both.
"The issue is that dumping impoverished peasants on geometrically-plotted patches of virgin non-arable land, without any infrastructure, tillage equipment, venture capital, housing, water supplies, or training will result quite simply in an ecological disaster," says Professor du Toit.
"Wildlife populations are being overhunted and snared, habitat loss has been rapid, and the whole crisis risk getting exponentially worse."
Professor du Toit acknowledges that Zimbabwe itself cannot afford to provide that sort of infrastructure. But he believes the international community could step in and help. He says its too late to undo the damage, but there was need to save the little that left.
He believes Zimbabwe can still find a solution to cut its losses. But if it fails to do so, he thinks the future is bleak.
"We're going to lose some large populations and some important gene pools in the near future," says Professor du Toit.
Post published in: Environment