Johannesburg - The Parks and Wildlife Management Authority of Zimbabwe plans to produce biltong from elephant meat to sell in retail outlets throughout the country "as part of sustainable utilisation of the animals", the Herald online said on Friday.
Parks director-general Dr Morris Mtsambiwa said the project began last year after the Ministry of Environment and Tourism permitted the authority to experiment with the "resource".
"It is in our plans. We plan to start this year. We tried it last year and we found that we did not have the proper infrastructure for the purpose," he reportedly said.
Mtsambiwa said the authority would apply to the Ministry of Environment and Tourism for a quota of elephants to slaughter every year, after which it would build some abattoirs, the Herald reported.
He said slaughtering the animals for biltong would, however, not reduce the size of the elephant herd in the country, which has far surpassed the carrying capacity of the national parks.
The country would need to slaughter at least 6 000 animals every year to have an impact on the population of the elephants.
"It is estimated that there are more than 100 000 elephants in Zimbabwe, a figure three times more than the carrying capacity of the protected areas," the Herald said.
Currently, the country slaughters at least 500 elephants every year with the meat distributed to communities living adjacent to the game parks.
"The size of the elephant herd is posing serious environmental challenges in Zimbabwe and other Southern African countries including Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa and Zambia.
"It is estimated that the regional elephant population has now surpassed 400 000 and is growing at between four to seven percent every year," the Herald said.
The affected countries had since formulated an African Elephant Management Strategy that seeks to address the problem of the ballooning population.
"We have agreed on a work plan which we will start implementing this year," Mtsambiwa was quoted as saying.
He added that the work plan was agreed on at a meeting of director-generals of national parks in the region held in the town of Pemba in Mozambique in November last year.
The meeting agreed that an aerial survey be conducted simultaneously in the respective countries to establish the population of the elephants in order to avoid double counting, he said.
Zimbabwe currently heads the regional task force on finding strategies to control the population of elephants in the region, the Herald said.
"At least some options have since been identified to control the elephant population, including contraception, culling and translocation.
"It was agreed that individual countries would take options depending on resources at their disposal, capacity and situation."
The newspaper reported that contraception was a preferred option in view of pressure from animal rights groups against culling, "although it is expensive and sometimes does not work". - Sapa