This was submitted on 31 May 2012 to the Secretariat by Allan Dauchi of the Ministry of Lands, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection (duchi45@yahoo.com). A little background to the Lower Zambezi proposed plunder by Zambia’s political elite On 18 October 2008, Chiefs Chiawa, Chipepo, Simamba, Sinadambwe, Mphuka and Mburuma met and issued an historic declaration against mining on behalf of 17 chiefdoms of the Zambezi Basin. This decision is extremely relevant to that beacon of light, the Nagoya Protocol on biocultural rights of the Convention on Biological Diversity. On 11 May 2012, the US- based Kuipers & Associates L.L.C., reviewed the EIS of the proposed mining of the Lower Zambezi National Park, declaring that it, ‘grossly fails to meet US or international standards for environmental assessment…because it significantly underestimates the potential for water quality issues, fails to identify that issue as significant and offers no substantive assessment or mitigation for water contamination’. The EIS also failed to follow international guidelines on de-commissioning and closure plans, and grossly underestimated the costs. In this month I mounted the petition on change.org against the mining. On 31 May 2012, is the report here under discussion On 31 August 2012 the Zambia Environmental Management Agency rejects the mining project In July 2013 a Parliamentary Committee rejects the mining In September 2013, Harry Kalaba – former assistant to Guy Scott – takes over as Minister. On 17 January 2014 Kalaba gives the Australians permission to destroy the National Park. The Ministry’s Plan The most notable being to ‘Enact legislation on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from the Utilization of Genetic Resources’, so confirming the Nagoya Protocol of the CBD and the rights of customary people not to have mining if they so wish and to have their sacred groves in the Park protected The Ministry’s poor understanding In the report the Ministry said that there are 19 National Parks which, ‘exclude exploitation or occupation inimical to the purposes of designation of the area…’. When it got on to Game Management Areas (GMAs) they wrote that ‘GMAs comprise mostly communally-owned land that is used primarily for the sustainable utilization of wildlife, through hunting and/or non-consumptive tourism concessions for the benefit of local communities and the wildlife resource, but which can also be used for other land uses such as settlement, agriculture, forestry, mining etc. In addition GMAs are jointly managed by ZAWA and the Local Communities through Community Resource Boards’. The Facts Obviously mining in a National Park does not make it possible to exclude ‘exploitation or occupation inimical to the purposes of designation of the area’. All GMAs ‘are communally-owned’ falling as they do within customary area. The residents of these areas suffer the depredations of wildlife but without compensation, and have been defrauded of income they were supposed to receive from hunting-safaris. The land cannot just be ‘used’ for other landuses. This would depend on a number of factors: land size, land alienation or not, usufruct and so on. GMAs are not jointly managed by the Zambia Wildlife Authority and the Community Resource Board, only the game stocks and the hunting. GMAs are part of the chiefdoms, and under their authority. And the first protected area was proclaimed in 1899, not 1924. The Ministry’s Key Threats laid out in the report ‘v). Mining and Road Construction Activities: These have resulted in the fragmentation of ecosystems and habitats and obstruct migratory routes to breeding and feeding grounds used by wildlife and fish’. The reality Apart from this woeful attempt to report to the CBD, it is clear that satisfaction regarding the mining is unlikely to come from the judicial process, nor the rather weak civil society response. We await the 2016 election.