Algeria drops plan to protect wetland

Reuters 2 Feb 08;

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algeria has started building a motorway through a major Mediterranean wetland despite a previous promise to re-route the $11 billion project around it, a newspaper said on Saturday.

The government said last year it was planning to avoid the El Kala coastal park after pressure from environmentalists who warned the site would disappear unless the 1,200 km (750 miles) road linking Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco was routed around it.

But independent French-language newspaper El Watan, publishing a picture of a bulldozer inside the park, said local authorities had allowed work to start at the site after receiving a letter from Prime Minister Abdelaziz Bemlkhadem.

Officials at the Public Works Ministry, which is carrying out the project, were not immediately available for comment.

The government had initially planned to build 15 km (nine miles) of the road inside the perimeter of northeastern El Kala, whose 800 sq km (300 sq miles) home to many varieties of predatory birds, fox, lynx, tortoise and wild cat.

The park contains one site that Algeria has undertaken to protect under the 1971 Ramsar Convention on the protection of wetlands.

(Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed, editing by Matthew Tostevin)