The long road from Dar es Salaam brings you through sparsely wooded hills and fields to the narrow northern neck of the Kilombero valley. There’s a bend in the road, then the land opens out, suddenly, in front of you.

Along the west side lie the steep-faced Udzungwa mountains, one of the last pristine rainforests in Tanzania. The Kilombero river runs through the red soils of the valley, flooding in November or December and subsiding by June. Down the longer eastern flank rise the Mahenge mountains, and beyond them, invisible, unfurls the vast territory of the Selous game reserve, one of the largest remaining chunks of African wilderness.

Ryan Shallom was 16 the first time he saw the Kilombero valley, in 1990. “There were 600 lions in the valley back then,” recalls Shallom, whose family were professional hunters, running trips for tourists and rich Tanzanians. The light tree cover in the valley’s higher ground, the rivers, the abundance of food and water, meant that this was a haven not just for elephants, lions, and buffalos, but for all wildlife: a pocket Eden.

“We used to see herds of 100 elephants or more, buffalo in all directions … There was the world’s largest population of puku antelope, about 60,000. I think 75% of the world’s population of puku were in Kilombero.”

But from the mid 90s, the wildlife began to disappear. In 1998, elephant numbers in the valley were over 5,000, according to data collected by the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute. Now elephants are rarely seen. The lions have gone too, although there are rumours that there is one male lion left. The puku are vanishing: Shallom estimates their numbers have fallen to just over a thousand. The crocodiles, hippos, and zebra, have all more or less vanished.

“We call it the ghost safari now,” says scientist turned safari-man Roy Hinde. “It’s devastating.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ryan Shallom remembers a time when there were 600 lions in the Kilombero valley. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/the Guardian

A history of aid in Kilombero valley

For many years Kilombero valley defied change. Tribes such as the Pogoro, the Ndamba-Mbunga, the Hehe and the Ngindo had lived there for centuries or frequently travelled through. From 1800 onwards the Europeans – first Germans, then after the first world war, British – started to arrive, eyeing up the fertile soil and making enormous plans. But somehow their plans kept falling through.

A few years after Julius Nyerere became president of an independent Tanganyika in 1961, a British survey hypothesised “complete control of the flooding” in the valley to “free a vast area for irrigation”, explains Mikael Bergius, a phd student who lives in the valley. But it would never happen. Nyerere did not like western foreign investors, although help from communist China was acceptable. The majority of farmers in the valley then were small-scale tribal farmers – about 64,000 or thereabouts. The foreigners, meanwhile, came and went. Over and over again foreign dreams – a sugar plantation, a rice farm, a railway – withered and died in the valley.

But in 1985 Nyerere stepped down. The new government set about the task of opening up to foreign investors once again. Kilombero’s magic trick was about to come to an end.

In the 90s, the decade that Shallom and Hinde both arrived in the valley for the first time, the rice plantation and the sugar plantation were already in place, but they were sluggish, half-abandoned, state-propped up enterprises. Parts of the plantations were being used by farmers from the valley, while others were being reclaimed slowly by the forest. Farmers speckled the rest of the valley but mostly it was a little oasis, far away from the 20th century.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A photo taken by Shallom in the mid-90s, when elephants regularly walked through his land. Photograph: Ryan Shallom/Sophie Tremblay/the Guardian

“The encroachment started in the mid 90s when the cattle started moving in,” says Shallom. Tanzania, like other African countries, was experiencing a rapid growth in livestock – a profitable, moveable way to store capital at a time when demand for meat, both on the continent and in the rest of the world, was beginning to explode. Pastoralist tribes in Tanzania – particularly the Sukuma – began to move into the valley in ever larger numbers, bringing large herds of their distinctive long-horned cattle.

A teak plantation followed, funded by British aid money in the form of the Commonwealth Development Company (now known as CDC). Over the next few years it would take over 28,000 hectares (69,189 acres), and become the largest teak farm in Africa.

In 1998, the Tanzanian government sold the sugar plantation to Illovo, Africa’s biggest sugar company, now owned by the mega-corp Associated British Foods which continued an outgrower programme that was being tried out. There were already farmers moving into the area, but the outgrower system would turbo-charge the in-migration. The main plantation supported small-scale farmers by buying their crops at a set pre-agreed price: in some cases out-growers got training and support, and had a ready market for their crops. The model caught on fast and by 2002 there were about 3,300 outgrowers; by 2006 that number had swollen to nearly 6,000.

Finally buyers were found for the rice plantation; another international consortium involving Agrica, another British-based company. This too began an outgrower programme which was as popular as the one up the valley. Within a few years the plantation was dealing with 480 or more outgrowers.

The Tanzanian government was supportive of the growth and appeared to be supportive of the investors (although there would be clashes too). In 2009 the government announced their Kilimo Kwanza initiative – “Agriculture First” – which would prioritise the transformation and growth of the country’s agricultural sector. And in 2010, the then Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete went to the World Economic Forum to pitch his country for investment, positing a new model for sustainable agricultural development based on the Kilombero outgrower model; clusters of agribusiness which incorporated small-scale farmers. Sagcot – the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania – was born and the investors loved it. USAid promised $2m on the spot.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An aerial view at the base of the Udzungwa mountains, where the farmland runs up against the forest. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/For The Guardian

Aid money and international funds came rolling in. A bewildering network of initiatives and partnerships between business and the international sector (Feed the future, the New Alliance, the New Vision for Agriculture Initiative, the Grow Africa Partnership) was either setting up or already in place and focusing on Africa, and Tanzania and Kilombero were perfect candidates. British and Norwegian aid money went to the rice plantation. World Bank money went to the teak plantation. USAid came in to rehabilitate roads, build bridges and generally slosh cash around. Thanks to the west, thanks to aid, it was boomtime in the valley.

The population, meanwhile, grew rapidly. All you needed to do to set up a farm, after all, was to get permission from the local village and pay them a small fee, and then clear an area and get cracking. Nearby were readymade markets for your produce. The valley was beautiful, the land welcoming and fertile. It is hardly surprising that between 1964 and 2015 the valley’s population rose from 56,000 to more than half a million.



What about the wildlife?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baboons still live in the valley. One farm at least employs a boy with a catapult to keep them out of the crops. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/For The Guardian

“We tried to get people interested,” says Shallom. “For years we shouted and screamed and did everything we could to get someone to pay attention. We suggested that the valley should be aggregated into the Selous reserve. We talked to the newspapers, to local government officials, to everyone we could get hold of. But no one was interested.”



The valley was being radically transformed. The miombo forest, the open plains, were disappearing as the small farms and the big farms encroached. Every day more of the valley floor was covered with miles of sugar and rice plantation, or with the monocultural teak forests.

The difference is startling. Miombo forest is a mixture of high trees, evergreens, shrubs, flowers, creepers and undergrowth. You can actually hear the density of life here; the low throb of bees, a whine of other insects, the calls of the doves and the shrikes.

Teak is entirely different. The trees are slender, elegant, reaching up to 150ft when mature. The leaves are huge, simple, obtuse in shape with undivided blades; they are thick and slightly sandpapery to the touch. “When they fall on the ground,” Hinde says, “they kill undergrowth. You can’t grow anything beneath teak trees.” The empty ground beneath the trees, which grow in neat and unnerving lines, means that in this forest it is nearly silent. We spot a solitary buffalo spider, and a few butterflies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An aerial view of the teak plantation in the valley. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/For The Guardian

“I talked to the teak company about building wildlife corridors,” says Hinde, who monitored the impacts for the conservation NGO Frontier. He’d come to the valley as a young scientist, but had given up in frustration by the time he spoke to the Guardian, and started his own safari company, Wild Things, hoping to instead spur action by bringing people to see the incredible wildlife. “They did make a number of changes to make the plantations more wildlife friendly.” Measures included setting aside large areas for conservation and breaking up the teak zones in order to help out wildlife. “But the corridors they built were too narrow. Villagers would put pitfall traps in them and the elephants would go in feet-first and be trapped for their meat and for their ivory.”

Pressure on the wildlife was also coming from the rising population. “There has been a massive increase in smallholder farming (predominantly rice) and nomadic cattle herding,” says KVTC head Hans Lemm. “Pastoralists have entered the valley in significant numbers since the early 2000s.”



The old tribes would eat fish, according to Father Klimakus Chahali, who grew up in the valley, and now runs the mission in the town of Itete. “They didn’t cut down trees.” Rumours abounded that some of the new arrivals in the valley had a less friendly attitude to wildlife, and were killing the lions in the valley to protect their livestock. “One year,” says Shallom, “I found 22 lion carcasses. They were poisoning them with pesticides.” Bushmeat consumption and poaching rose too: “We knew there were cartels operating in the valley but again no one wanted to know.”

Other conservationists tried to sound the alarm along with Hinde and Shallom. Trevor Jones of the Southern Tanzania Elephant Program (Step) was one of the most effective; his 2007 map of the wildlife corridors in the valley along with his warnings that they would shortly be shut made it into a number of environmental assessments, including USAID’s. “It has been very sad to see all the overgrazing and conversion to farmland of wildlife habitat in the Kilombero valley over the last decade,” says Jones.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A giant footprint up in the north of the valley shows a last remaining spot where elephants still sometimes come out of the forest to nibble at the edges of the sugar plantation. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/For The Guardian

Anna Estes, a conservationist working in the north of the country, says: “The main threat to elephants overall is not big agriculture, but unofficial development from subsistence farmers. 80% of farming in Tanzania is small-scale subsistence farming. Because it is unplanned, this causes a lot of damage to elephant habitat. Aside from the immediate threat from poaching, habitat loss is the number one threat to elephants these days, and human-elephant conflict is an extension of that.” The outgrower programme – if inadvertently – magnified that effect tenfold.

Today farms completely line the road that lies along the west of the valley. A brand new road is planned that will lead from Ifakara, in the centre, along down the east side beside the Selous. Everywhere you look, there are blackened stumps and cleared land, marking the new arrivals creating new farms. Forests that were here a year ago have disappeared. New farms have sprung up in their place.

In a cafe in one village they tell us that most people here have arrived in the last few years; the man in charge only moved here two years ago. Has he ever seen or heard of elephants in the area? He shakes his head. No.

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So how did government and aid money end up being used to help fund the destruction of a wildlife haven?

“I work more and more with the World Bank or the African Development Bank,” says scientist Holly Dublin, “and I see what their plans and what they are giving loans for to these governments. It is like there’s a total disconnect. So what you are going to see is that of course, elephants come last. In fact, anything to do with wildlife comes last.”

It wasn’t that the big donors were unaware of the risks. The World Bank did 320 pages of assessment on Sagcot [pdf] with a specific case study on Kilombero. They highlighted the “high risk from accelerated agribusiness investment” noting possible “increasing pressure on the forests and their biodiversity”. “There was some discontent at the World Bank around the project,” says Doug Hertzler of ActionAid, who has closely followed the impacts of the Tanzanian agricultural plans. “For a long time the funding was held up because of the concerns.” They hesitated and dragged their feet – but in the end the money went through.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 7 North Ruipa IMG 2807 Lions, elephants and hippos have all vanished from Kilombero valley, Tanzania, after UK and US funded projects helped turn a once-thriving habitat into vast tracts of farmland, teak, and sugar plantations Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/For The Guardian

It was a similar story with the US aid agency, USAID, who noted in their own extensive report that “Kilombero Valley Floodplain is of global, national, regional and local importance in terms of its ecology and biodiversity” and added that “the most important direct threat to biodiversity comes in the form of the conversion, loss, degradation, and fragmentation of natural ecosystems”. But they went in nonetheless, and their work can be seen all over the valley – including the rehabilitation of a road that runs straight through the heart of the Ruipa wildlife corridor and which will, undoubtedly bring more traffic.

A USAID spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania said they were working to help Tanzania improve its environmental performance. Asked if economic development was incompatible with that, he said: “It is a problem and we’re very conscious of it ... When we’re looking at doing a project we’re looking for that balance between environmental issues and sustainable living. It’s a juggling act and we’re always looking for new ideas.”

UK money went in too, in the form of a grant to the rice plantation and support for SAGCOT (they had also been key funders of the teak plantation). They told the Guardian: “DFID’s support to developing agriculture in Tanzania is vital for maintaining a stable supply of food, creating jobs and improving prosperity for hundreds of thousands of households. All our agriculture programmes are environmentally sustainable, and protect wildlife and biodiversity, while helping the poorest people lift themselves and their families out of poverty for good.” But they also point out, very reasonably, that “trade and job creation are the means through which developing countries will become self-sufficient, eliminate poverty and hunger, and end their dependency on aid to help Tanzania stand on its own two feet.”

“I don’t know that development banks can be blamed for not taking into account wildlife,” says Dublin. “They take into account the health needs, the food needs, the water needs … So the fact that they have done their land use planning and the government and the guys who have responsibility for wildlife have not stepped up to the plate in that, I think you have to be careful how you tell that story. When a development agency gives a loan to expand a food project, that is what they are supposed to be doing. That is their job.”

The companies in the valley all worry about this too and have all employed their own techniques to try to stem the losses. The rice plantation has run education courses on modern agricultural techniques in order to help local people grow more rice in a smaller area; the teak plantation, in some places, has alternated teak and miombo to try to give the wildlife some space. The sugar plantation is trying to build up a forest area in one part of in the north of the valley where elephants are still sometimes seen, so that the elephants will continue to pass that way without stumbling into the plantations (a beehive fence to keep them in the forest has been strung along one point). But they agree that the problem is just getting worse. As KVTC head Lemm says: “We have seen a significant reduction in wildlife. In particular large mammals and the various wildlife corridors that we are part of are under severe pressure.”

The Tanzanian government has other priorities. Growth is, of course, prioritised over biodiversity. Julius Nyerere once said “I personally am not very interested in animals. I do not want to spend holidays watching crocodiles. Nevertheless, I am entirely in favour of their survival.” “I talk to heads of state about this all the time,” says Kaddu Sebunya, head of the African Wildlife Foundation. “One president said to me. ‘I’ve never had a voter ask me for more elephants or more natural parks’. They want hospitals, education, and that’s what keeps him awake at night.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smallholder farmers and pastoralists have moved in huge numbers to the valley, cutting down forest as they go. Photograph: Sophie Tremblay/For The Guardian

Scientists are warning that a mass species extinction is already underway. Agriculture is one of the most serious threats to the planet’s biodiversity, and the demand for food and agricultural land is only going to grow. In Kilombero Valley the World Bank predicts that “the demand for agricultural land will almost double in the coming 20 years, with a large increase for rice and maize and a smaller increase for sugarcane”. Globally, the Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that an extra 1.2m hevtares of land will be needed for agriculture by 2050. “Much of the suitable land not yet in use is concentrated in a few countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa,” says the FAO report. It makes no reference to biodiversity, but does mention that “part of the land is forested, protected or subject to expanding urban settlements.”

“We have to be pragmatic, and agree to lose something,” says Kaddu. The Africa Wildlife Foundation tries to explain to governments and businesses that they need an ecosystem that functions. “If you want to continue getting water for agriculture, you need to maintain a landscape that produces rain. But the truth is that we can’t have it all. Africa is going to lose wildlife. We are going to have to negotiate. We are going to have to lose a few elephants.” Conservationists in Tanzania are working on dozens of initiatives to improve, or at least slow the decline in the biodiversity of Kilombero valley.

Shallom is less sanguine. After years of battling with the state, he shut down his hunting lodge and left the valley. For a while he just gave it all up and let his business fall away; he admits that for the last few years he has struggled. Now he has two new concessions in the Selous; for the first time in the conversation his face lights up as he talks about building up the wildlife there again. But the happiness disappears when we go back to the subject of the valley. “I’ve seen Kilombero from its best to its worst,” he says. “To me it is a closed chapter, a very bitter pill I had to swallow. Kilombero is done now. It’s over.”

Additional reporting by James Randerson