Tens of millions wild animals die in Africa to safe children. UNICEF to blame?

Last Fryday, Michael Fae spoke at the National Conservation Training Center (http://nctc.gov) on mega transects, a method he has applies in Africa and now also on the Appalachian trail in that runs 2175 miles through the Appalachian Mountains of North America from Maine to Georgia (http://www.nps.gov/appa/)
He showed countless beautiful slights of African wildlife, and part of it particularly caught my attention. As many may know, mammals in Africa heavily depend on waterholes, particularly during the dry season. In some cases, local people use the consentration of animals in and around those waterholes to make an easy harvest of whatever they can get their hands on. One of the methods is to poison a waterhole with............... DDT to catch some fish. Wao, I thought, I thought that stuff had been banned for decades! Apparently not so.

In many countries in Africa, DDT can be bought cheaply and it appears to be distributed by or with the help of UNICEF in its quest to reduce or eradicate malaria, no doubt intended to be used to only spray inside homes (see also http://www.perc.org/perc.php?subsection=5&id=310). Having almost lost my wife and daughter to malaria in Benin about 3 decades ago, I have personal experience with the devastating attacks of this horrible disease. So I don't take malaria lightly! But there must be an alternative to handing out malaria to local people of at least distributing it at extremely low costs.

If you poison waterholes with DDT, the poison becomes more and more concentrated as the waterbody dries out, while the mammals start accumulating more and more DDT in their tissues as the dry season progresses, and even large mammals like elephants can perish, or at least their babies. But do you believe that as these poor villagers have access to cheap DDT that they won't use it to protect their harvests? DDT can double or triple their harvests! So the unintended use of DDT is virtually unavoidable when you make it available and wherever it is used it will have a devastating and long-lasting effect among birds, fishes, mammals, reptiles and probably even among children and unborn babies.

I don't know the answer or a solution, but there must be a better way of dealing with malaria than by promoting the use of DDT. People that donate to UNICEF must not be put in the situation where their donation safes a child but kill wild animals!