Be Careful Africa

The Bushmeat Crisis Africa (BCA) website is dedicated to inform and warn the public about the bushmeat catastrophe we are currently facing in Africa. Visit this website monthly for recent updates & related links; become educated and involved in whichever manner possible as it concerns us, and your future.

In the face of unbelievable odds stacked against the survival of most animal species in the wild, it is difficult to imagine that more than a small percentage of the current species will see the middle of this century in Central Africa.

The ongoing destruction of habitats, un-sustainable hunting and over utilization of most living recourses in the Bushmeat Crisis, compounded by seemingly endless greed and ongoing wars in many of the pivotal habitat areas, will ultimately lead to the extinction of most species living in the wild today.

Bio-diversity is facing its darkest hour, the problems are almost insurmountable, we are confronted with an extreme situation, and we need to look for extreme solutions to these problems if we are to succeed. Normal conservation policies are no longer enough; we need to look outside that square, if we are to beat this problem. We need to institute a new and more lateral way of approaching species survival. We can do it, it is not inconceivable that conservation organizations around the world, could work together, pool recourses and implement strategies that yesterday may have been considered inappropriate, but today may mean the difference between survival and extinction.

Bushmeat is undoubtedly the single most significant blow to wildlife populations. Bushmeat is the word assigned to the unsustainable over utilization of the wildlife resources in Africa and other parts of the World where forests are being logged and simultaneously denuded of its wildlife inhabitants.

Historically, indigenous people have been utilizing animal meat from the forests for centuries; this has in the past been done sustainably. The picture changed with the arrival of logging companies, who started pushing logging roads from horizon to horizon into impenetrable forest. They then brought in thousands upon thousands of logging staff who needed to be fed, and these would generally arrive without any provision for food. Instead hundreds of hunters would be brought in to kill animals in the surrounding forest to feed the loggers. These hunters are poorly paid, but are allowed to sell excess meat from the forest to generate extra cash, they are even permitted to transport their bounty on the logging trucks as they haul their timber to export yards.

This changed the whole face of forest utilization, the villages got sucked into lucrative forestry logging jobs, the villagers also became reliant on the abundance of meat coming from the forest, which were previously impenetrable, not only were the loggers now being fed, but a whole meat industry developed in the villages and towns. Soon this meat “Bushmeat” found its way abroad, and onto the menus of many eastern restaurants, meat from the forests became a commodity, which soon found itself in every corner of the globe.

Wild life populations were devastated, driven into pockets of forest in diminished numbers, the carnage goes on, even the isolated areas are now being exploited, and it is believed that all wild animals species will be extinct in the wild in Central Africa by 2050 at the current rate of demise.

The Bushmeat Crisis Taskforce, a USA Zoo initiative was started in 1999 to address the situation, they immediately did a study to ascertain the extent of the problem, results were devastating, more than the equivalent meat of 10 million head of cattle was being taken out of the Central African Rain Forests each year, this was only a small percentage of what was actually being killed, as many animals were snared, and rotted away in the forest.

There is now a silence sweeping over the forests, devoid of life this sad state of affairs has been aptly named “Empty Forest Syndrome”

Forests continue coming under growing pressures. Ten years ago, the forests in the Congo for example were virtually untouched, however, today logging operations are shrinking these forests at an alarming rate. It is estimated that logging is deforesting World forests at a rate of 6,000 square meters a second.

Central Africa’s forests cover 1,863,000 km2, of which 68% is in large contiguous blocks. However, it is important to underscore that the situation is rapidly changing for the worse, because 41% of those pristine areas have been allocated to commercial logging concessions.

Cameroon is by far the worst off from logging, between 1990 and 2000, over 9 million hectares of forest was cleared in Cameroon alone. Issued logging concessions cover 76% percent of Cameroon’s total protected and unprotected forests. Look at this in contrast to the period between 1959 and 1990 when only 6% of Cameroon's unprotected forests had been allocated for logging.
The most sought after legal logging licence is known as "ventes de coupe". Ventes de coupe licence holders are entitled to log an area of 2,500 hectares of the permanent forest over a three-year period. Due to the short-term nature of the title, and the lack of requirement for any management plan, the forests are often logged in a highly destructive manner. These titles are also frequently abused to organise illegal logging over a much larger area.

The impact of logging on wildlife bio-diversity is aggravated by wars, mining and genocide. Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park became one of the great names in gorilla conservation, with the pioneering American naturalists Diane Fossey and George Schaller both having worked there. These forests are now infested with armed groups, and these have been joined by the tens of thousands of illegal miners digging for tantalum used in cell phones and space aviation, the price of this mineral has soared over the past year.

Recent surveys state that only 70 eastern lowland gorillas remain in the highlands of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, compared with a population of 258 ten years ago. Gorilla numbers have been drastically cut as a result of Bushmeat, faction fighting and general lawlessness.

Unarmed guards, paid in part by a German aid agency, still patrol seven times a day in the highland region that forms a small section of the park. The situation in Kahuzi-Biega, Democratic Republic of Congo, deteriorated seriously in 1994 when Hutu militiamen and soldiers from the former Rwandan army - responsible for a genocide that claimed the lives of an estimated 800,000 people in Rwanda, mostly Tutsis - fled into the Congo and took refuge in the park.

There are several No-Go Areas within Kahuzi-Biega. As example: the park staff say they have access to only about five percent of Kahuzi-Biega. The rest of the park's lowlands are largely a no-go area prone to banditry and occupied in part by pro-Kabila militiamen.

Problems similar to this are true of most the National Parks and Conservation Areas in Central Africa, even stretching as far south as Zimbabwe.

If you ask 10 people, you will most probably get 10 differing solutions, each with is own merits or demerits. Some solutions may be practical, some may not. The big question is will any of them have such a profound effect on the Bushmeat problem that it will be able to stem the over utilisation, and allow species numbers to start moving back into healthy proportions in future.

Well if the answer is no, then it is not really a solution, but merely a delay of the inevitable.

Consider the impact of stopping unsustainable commercial logging, after all logging is the route cause of the Bushmeat crisis. I think we will all agree that if this one thing could be accomplished, it would have a profound impact on the future of Bushmeat!

Ask yourself if there is anything else that could be more instrumental in halting the crisis, if there is nothing that will be as effective, then stopping unsustainable logging is what has to be achieved.

Not an awful lot on our own. But what we can do, is get the wheels in motion, get other interested and affected parties to accept this as a potential solution, motivate more powerful organisations to work together, to pool resources, and attack the problem from all fronts.
After all, if the all powerful Swiss Bankers could be called to book for being an ally in custodianship of the plunder of the Holocaust, and the greatest mining Giants Anglo America and De Beers can be called to book for sustaining apartheid in that they allowed the employment of a suppressed people at next to no pay, and in condition which were wanting, then surely:

Those companies who have raped and plundered the forests, destroyed the bio-diversity, slaughtered the animals, and deprived inhabitants of their heritage and birthright, for a fist full of gold, can also be brought to book.

Lets start by reaching into our pockets and support the BCA fundraiser at this AGM.

Lets talk to The Bushmeat Crisis Taskforce, ask them to run with our proposed solution.

Lets speak to The IUCN, Conservation International, EAZA and anyone else who will listen.

Lets create a dedicated BCA Website, which can identify logging companies, assemble information, and act as a conduit for communication between all the soldiers who will take up arms.

Lets identify and know our enemy, they are many and they are powerful, they include The International Monitory Fund, The World Bank and all those organisations who are gagged by the funding they receive from these financial powerhouses. It is a known and publicised fact that 95% of all logging in Africa is funded by one of these two organisations.

We need to motivate a powerful organisation to champion this the project, to find the legal firm that will take up the challenge, and secure their retainer.

We need to create awareness, as the more people who know, and start thinking and talking the same language the easier and faster this is going to start. - BCA