Mago and Omo National Parks were drawn across land that people already lived on and grazed. The result is a long, unresolved tension between conservation, the state and the peoples whose territory the parks overlap.
Most visitors encounter Mago National Park as a line on a map and a fee at a gate. For the people who live there it is something else: a designation applied to land they were already using, which changed what they were permitted to do on it.
The parks
This is the pattern that recurs across the region: land that is inhabited being classified as land that is wild.
Why conservation and pastoralism collide
Pastoral land use requires mobility — moving herds between wet and dry season grazing, and to water in bad years. Protected areas typically restrict exactly that mobility, and often the burning, cultivation and settlement that go with it. The conflict is structural, not a matter of bad intentions on either side.
Tourism's part in it
Park fees and tourism revenue are among the justifications for protected areas, and visitors are part of that economy. Whether — and how much — of that revenue reaches the communities whose land the parks overlap is a fair question for any visitor to ask.
Compounding pressure
Parks are one of three simultaneous pressures on Lower Omo land, alongside dams and irrigated plantations and resettlement policy. Their cumulative effect on grazing and cultivation is greater than any one of them considered alone — which is why profiles across this site describe land pressure as the defining contemporary issue rather than a background condition.
What a visitor should hold in mind
Paying a park fee is not the same as compensating a community. When you travel here you are moving through a landscape whose legal status and lived status differ, and the people you meet may have views about that worth listening to. See responsible travel.
What we still need
Current fee and revenue-sharing data; and the accounts of Mursi and other affected communities about what park designation has meant in practice.
Sources & further reading
Park boundaries, fees and enforcement change; verify current arrangements before publication.
- David Turton, on the Mursi, Mago National Park and the state. — verify before publish
- Literature on protected areas, pastoralism and displacement in East Africa. — verify before publish
- Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority materials on Mago and Omo National Parks. — verify before publish