HEADLINES:
R/€ 
Oil In the past, game was locally hunted and eaten as part of the diet of villagers … Now it is being consumed on an industrial scale
June 14, 2006 Edition 1
Antoine Lawson
Elephant trunks and smoked gorilla limbs hang from Emile Ndong's stall, "ripening" in the tropical heat.
"A good ceremony, a marriage or an initiation is worthless unless you serve game at the table," said Ndong, a hawker at the bustling Oloumi market in Gabon's capital of Libreville.
Ndong is one of many profiting from Africa's booming trade in bushmeat - a blood-soaked business that has serious consequences for the continent's wildlife.
Finding ways to curtail this industry will be discussed at an international conference in Madagascar from Tuesday to June 24, which will seek ways to harness Africa's ecological treasures for development, while also protecting them.
"Bushmeat is probably the biggest threat to biodiversity in Central Africa," said Juan Carlos Bonilla, head of the Central Africa programme for Conservation International, the main organiser of the Madagascar symposium.
From Ivory Coast in the west through Equatorial Guinea to Kenya in the east, poaching to feed the bushmeat market is rampant. And it is threatening entire species, including man's closest relatives, the great apes.
Even in the continent's economic powerhouse of South Africa, poor farmers and rural labourers poach wild game to supplement their incomes, using snares, poisons and traps.
Bonilla said two key factors were driving the trade.
"There is rapid urbanisation, with cities becoming populated with migrants from the countryside. These migrants settle but continue a way of life that is linked to the forest," he said.
The other factor is the opening up of previously remote and wildlife-rich regions by the logging industry, which is hacking new roads into rainforest regions.
"These are structured markets which start with commercial hunters in the forest, using mostly snares and traps, but they are linked to major urban markets," Bonilla said.
The prices vary but delicacies such as monkey can command $150 (about R1 000) or more.
The hunters themselves get a pittance.
So job creation and the reduction of poverty would probably go a long way towards eliminating the "production" side of the industry.
"Providing alternative employment is a measure that would probably enjoy broad-based local support (on Bioko Island)," the study said.
Primate species at risk on Bioko Island include the rare red and black colobus. Elsewhere gorillas and chimpanzees are targeted by the trade.
Conservationists have warned that poaching, logging and disease could soon wipe out the last of the world's great apes unless new strategies are adopted.
There is also a health risk for humans: scientists think past outbreaks of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in central Africa were caused by the consumption of infected monkey meat.
In Gabon, the most sought after bushmeat items are monkey head, bush pig, crocodile, pangolin, gazelle, and elephant trunk - many of which are protected species.
At a sweltering open-air market in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, saleswomen flick clouds of flies off a bewildering variety of meat including pangolin and squirrels.
Denis Amani Kouame, director of Ivory Coast's water and forests ministry, said he did not have the resources to enforce the law, and that legalising hunting could help.
"Hunting has been forbidden in Ivory Coast since 1974 but nevertheless wildlife resources are diminishing at an alarming rate," he said.
"The only people benefiting ... are the poachers and restaurant owners who have established an illegal economic sector worth more than $193-million (R1,3-billion) per year," he said.
At the market, shoppers appear unperturbed at the sight of six dead bush pigs, their young still alive, tethered by their feet. - Reuters
© 1999 - 2009 Star & Independent Online (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved.