Great Apes Face Growing Threat of Extinction

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

4/10/97

OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE

The World Wide Fund for Nature reports on the seemingly imminent

demise of the great apes. The culprit is largely humankind's

destruction of habitat, and hunting for wild meat. Continued decline

of large mammals and keystone predators are symptomatic of the more

widespread ecological decline occurring throughout the globe.

Following is a photocopy of a Reuters report on the matter.

g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

Great apes face growing threat of extinction - WWF

4/10/97

GENEVA (Reuter) - The world's few remaining great apes, humankind's

nearest living relatives, face a growing threat of extinction from

man's destruction of their territory and the hunt for wild meat, a new

report said Thursday.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said unless there was coordinated

action by governments in central Africa and south-east Asia there

could be no halt to the dramatic decline in the numbers of great apes

-- chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orang-utans -- and their

eventual disappearance.

The report said major culprits were the growth in logging and "a

dramatic escalation in the bushmeat trade." Wildlife

meat could be found on restaurant menus from Cameroon to the

Congo republic, as well as in Paris and Brussels.

"We must act swiftly, we must act now, and we must plan on acting

indefinitely," said the report, entitled "Wanted Alive: Great Apes in

the Wild" which argued that richer countries in Europe and North

America should help poorer states with protection programs.

Elizabeth Kemf, one of the authors of the report, said most endangered

of the four great ape species were the mountain gorillas of central

Africa.

The last home of the animals, who once ranged wide across the

continent's misty uplands, is the wartorn area along the borders of

Rwanda, Uganda and Zaire -- where the remaining 620 live, according to

the report.

Although earlier efforts at conservation by the three governments had

enabled the animal to make a comeback from around 370 a few years ago,

they had come under serious threat from recent fighting and refugee

movements.

Around 700,000 Hutus who fled into Zaire after the 1994 genocide

against Tutsis in their homeland destroyed much forestland where the

gorillas roamed, and Zairian soldiers killed some to sell their meat.

But the some 200 in Zaire's Virunga National Park had their prospects

for survival improved, Kemf told Reuters, after rebels of the Alliance

of Democratic Forces took control of the region late last year.

The sprawling refugee camps emptied out as hundreds of thousands

returned to Zaire or fled westward. The insurgents, with WWF help,

started repairing the infrastructure of the park and retraining its

guards, she said.

But years of civil strife across central Africa and the Great Lakes

region had also put chimpanzees, whose numbers had dropped from

several million at the start of the century to between 100,000 and

200,000 today, and bonobos, in great peril.

The western lowland gorilla became extinct in Zaire, and across the

region bonobos -- a smaller species closely related to chimpanzees --

declined by 30 to 50 percent over the last decade and now totaled

around only 25,000, the report said.

In South-East Asia, home to orang-utans, less than two percent of

their original forest habitat in Malaysia and Indonesia remained,

reducing the population from an estimated 100,000 half a century ago

to around 30,000.

At the current rate of logging, the WWF declared, forests could

disappear within 70 years in Zaire, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

Until recently, African timber had largely gone to the European Union

but was now increasingly exported to Asia.

"Unsustainable logging and road construction for the logging industry,

agricultural expansion, oil exploration, mining and human migration

into ape habitat are all causing the animals' forest home to shrink as

never before," the report said.

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