factories of the Copperbelt provided wages to pay for food grown commercially on a relatively small amount of land. A large decrease in such employment over the past two or three decades has forced more people back to the rural areas to carry out subsistence agriculture and fishing, which puts pressure on a greater area of wildlife habitat. Increased unreliability of wet season rainfall, perhaps caused by global warming, exacerbates the problem. Thirdly, poor environmental management by government and a certain amount of corruption in some quarters has allowed poaching and uncontrolled exploitation of resources. Some national parks have had no management at all. In previous centuries, traditional rulers had greater control of hunting and natural resources. For example Lewanika, king of Barotseland, established the Liuwa Plain game reserve which today is a national park. The possibility of recruiting chiefs as modern-day managers of natural resources is hampered by rivalries with political leaders. The downgrading of their status and power by government and the erosion of traditional culture by modern materialism has also worsened the situation. Against this background, the animals which continue to flourish in Zambia outside parks are those with little food or other resource value, with less overlap with human habitat, or which can survive in human habitats. These include: most birds, except those whose breeding habitats are reduced; smaller mammals, such as bats, shrews, rodents, mongooses, the nocturnal small cats, vervet monkeys and galagos; and reptiles such as the Nile monitor and most snakes and lizards, except forest species. Animals in protected areas Five out of 20 national parks have lost most of their wildlife due to a lack of management. Of the remaining 15, two exist primarily for features other than wildlife (Nyika Plateau and Victoria Falls), and the rest have reasonably good wildlife resources despite some poaching. National parks protect 6.4% of the country. They all have larger game management areas (GMAs) as buffer zones around them in which hunting is subject to regulation, as it is in forest reserves which have additional regulations about land clearing and timber harvesting. Adequate patrolling and the enforcing of regulations has always been a problem, and illegal hunting and bush clearing still happens within protected areas. GMAs cover 15.6% of the country and forest reserves cover 7.2%, so 29.2% of the country is protected in theory (based on 1992 figures). Wildlife regions The main wildlife-rich areas of