91av

MOST of Central Africa’s large mammals will end up on somebody’s plate. 91av has learned that hunters annually kill almost as many animals as live in the rainforest for their meat. “Put simply, if they didn’t reproduce they would all be gone in just over a year,” warns John Fa of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey.

Last week Britain’s Bushmeat Campaign, which is backed by many zoos, called for a crackdown on the illicit sale of smuggled African bush meat, including chimpanzee and monkey meat, in specialist London stores.

In a pioneering new study, Fa has managed to put some hard figures on the burgeoning bush meat trade in Africa. He has discovered that hunters in the jungles of the Congo river basin take some 5 million tonnes of wild animal meat each year, setting many species on the path to extinction. That’s five times an earlier accepted estimate of 1 million tonnes, based on a study three years ago by David Wilkie, now at the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo in New York.

Fa calculated the rates of extraction for more than 50 species of mammals using hunting data from the Congo, the world’s second largest rainforest. He compared them with biologists’ estimates of how fast large mammals can reproduce in the wild.

The majority of species are being massively overhunted. He calculates that the weight of all the carcasses removed from the jungle by hunters in a year is equivalent to 93 per cent of the estimated weight of all the live animals in the jungle. A sustainable extraction rate would be about 20 per cent.

Some 33 million people now live in the Congo basin, says Fa. Hunting takes place almost everywhere, even in national parks, leaving few tracts of jungle where animal populations can recover undisturbed. Unless something is done to reduce the bush meat trade, he says, the result is likely to be a catastrophe for Africa’s forest wildlife. Animals most at risk of disappearing for good from the jungles of the Congo include the great apes, forest baboons such as the mandrill, and antelope-like duikers.

Traditional hunters who once killed for the pot now sell at the roadside and to traders with distant markets. Even in the cities, says Fa, “alternative protein sources are scarce, because of civil war, bad agricultural practices, and the impossibility of buying imports”. It is bush meat or nothing, and there is a growing export market.

“The solution to the crisis has more to do with finding alternative food supplies than stopping the hunters,” he told 91av. “If cheap meats were available for the people who buy bush meat, the demand for wild meat would drop.”

However, the news is better for the Amazon, the only rainforest region larger than the Congo. In a parallel study Fa found that because population densities there are much lower, hunting rates were only 3 per cent of those in the Congo. Although it is unlikely any species are being hunted unsustainably, he thinks there is probably overexploitation around hunting villages that could wipe out species in local areas.