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WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
Silence
Descends on Africa's Forests
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org
http://forests.org/ -- Forest
Conservation Archives
http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest
Conservation
3/15/00
OVERVIEW
& COMMENTARY
Following
is an excellent overview of the current African rainforest
conservation
situation. It is noted that the World's
final assault
on the
last true wilderness left on the African continent is occurring
in
Central Africa. Europe bears the
responsibility for having
deforested
so much of Africa over the centuries, and continuing to
provide
the market for much of the current timber being unsustainably
extracted.
g.b.
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TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Silence descends on Africa's forests
Second of two parts
Source: Tribune Foreign Correspondent
Status: Copyright 2000, contact source for
permission to reprint
Date: March 13, 2000
Byline: Paul Salopek
THE
CONGO BASIN RAIN FOREST, Cameroon In the steamy twilight of the
jungle,
Gilles Bokande hunkered beside a mossy stump and pinched his
nose
between his index and middle fingers. Blowing air through the
back of
his throat, he bleated like a duiker, a tiny forest antelope.
Nothing
happened.
Trudging
a mile deeper into Africa's largest remaining rain forest,
Bokande
crouched and tried again. Still no response.
The
animals don't come anymore when Bokande, a Baka Pygmy, calls them.
A fresh
logging road snakes nearby--a muddy funnel that siphons away
not
only the forest's primeval hardwoods but also thousands of wild
animals
poached for the dinner tables of urbanites in the burgeoning
cities
of Cameroon.
"It's
harder to find antelope, gorillas, chimpanzees and elephants,"
said
Bokande, a pleasant, wiry man whose teeth are filed to sharp
little
points. "The forest is getting quieter now."
Across
Africa, a remorseless silence is falling over the far untamed
corners
of a continent that long has symbolized wild nature to a
jaded,
overindustrialized world.
In
places such as the famed gorilla reserves of Uganda, where
conservationists
are desperately trying to link the needs of dwindling
wildlife
with those of land-hungry farmers, it is the silence of
nature
drowned out by the babble of human overpopulation. In countries
such as
Kenya and South Africa--which grimly lead the continent with
59 and
141 endangered species--it is the quiet absence of wild animals
outside
of zoolike national parks. And in hot spots like Angola and
Congo,
it is the pitiable hush that comes after the massacres of wild
animals
amid terrible civil wars.
But
here, deep in the lush rain forests of central Africa, that
deadened
stillness is even more ominous because it heralds the outside
world's
final assault on the last true wilderness left on the
continent.
In a rain forest second only to the Amazon in size,
environmentalists
are girding themselves for one of the defining
conservation
battles of the 21st Century: saving an African frontier
so wild
that its animals don't run away because they have never seen
humans
before.
"This
is the holy of holies," said World Wildlife Fund biologist Paul
Noupa,
one of the conservationists scrambling to set up wildlife
sanctuaries
so remote that they probably won't have visitors for
years.
"If we fail to preserve this place, we can only blame
ourselves.
All over Africa, you have a long history of conservation.
Not
here. Here we are starting from scratch, and the clock is
ticking."
Until
recently, time was of little consequence in the vast rain forest
that
stretches from Nigeria east to Rwanda.
About a
third as big as the continental United States, it was a
forgotten
refuge for Africa's densest concentrations of animals and
for the
Pygmies who hunted them with arrows and spears. But since the
early
1990s, a timber rush spearheaded by European logging companies
has
kicked off a classic story of greed and exploitation--a tale that
includes
an unprecedented slaughter of monkeys, an unseemly turf
battle
among conservation groups, and a cynical developed world that
wants
to have its rain forest and eat it too.
Logging
and hunting have gone hand in sweaty hand in the Congo Basin
for as
long as anyone can remember. But both activities have exploded
for reasons
few could have foreseen.
The
depletion of west Africa's forests, where Europe traditionally
bought
its tropical hardwoods, has launched a stampede of French,
German
and Middle Eastern logging companies into the more inaccessible
jungles
of central Africa. At the same time, a regional economic
crisis
has only accelerated the timber boom: Local currency
devaluations
in the mid-1990s effectively halved the cost of hauling
800-year-old
trees through hundreds of miles of forest to the parquet-
flooring
and furniture-making markets of Europe and Japan.
In
Cameroon, wood production soared 50 percent between 1992 and 1997,
the
last years for which figures are available.
Strapped
for cash because of slumping cacao exports, the government
has
gratefully seized the $60 million-a-year lifeline created by
logging
revenues. The story is the same in neighboring Gabon, where
declining
oil production is stoking the logging trade and where the
president,
Omar Bongo, owns 500,000 acres of prime timber concessions.
But
just as Mercedes-Benz logging trucks have begun rumbling in
earnest
along the Congo Basin's new mud highways, the public's
appetite
for wild animal meat surged in the teeming cities of
Cameroon,
Gabon, Congo and the Central African Republic.
Elephants,
antelopes and monkeys have been a staple of local
villagers'
diets for millenniums, of course. But Africa's swelling
urban
populations, nostalgic for village foods and flush with money,
have
turned a subsistence activity into a burgeoning, multimillion-
dollar
industry.
Newly
extended logging roads have become bush meat pipelines plied by
poachers
who snare and shoot anything in sight. Many logging companies
encourage
the hunting because it also saves on the cost of shipping
beef
into the remote jungle towns where their workers live.
"We
know it's a problem, and we are even planning to raise a herd of
cows
for workers to eat," said Thibaut Fuchs, the sawmill manager of
the
Forestry Association of Cameroon, a French-Cameroonian logging
company
that selectively harvests mahogany, sapeli and ebony from
200,000
acres of jungle. "But it's an uphill battle. People here say,
'You've
got to be kidding! Why raise cows? The forest is ours, and the
wild
animals are everywhere!' "
In
hundreds of town markets like the one in Yokadouma, a logging
center
set like a grubby island in the middle of southeastern
Cameroon's
oceanic canopy of trees, about a dozen vendors specialize
in
selling wild animal carcasses. Antelopes, skinned and trussed, look
like
small greyhounds frozen in mid-stride. Elephant meat is hacked
into
2-pound cubes. And smoked sections of an animal's large
intestine--possibly
from a forest buffalo--look like a charred fire
hose.
"The
bush meat trade is the No. 1 threat to biodiversity in the Congo
Basin,"
said Conrad Aveling, director of ECOFAC, a European-funded
environmental
group based in Gabon. "A logging road goes in, and five
years
later there isn't a single large animal left in the forests.
Thousands
of square kilometers have been hunted clean. We're talking
about
tons and tons of animal meat, including organized shipments that
go
across the borders of Gabon and Cameroon."
Hit
especially hard, environmentalists say, is the Congo Basin's rich
diversity
of primates. Monkey meat is prized as a status food among
urban
elites. Endangered gorillas can bring $100 on the wild-meat
market.
A chimpanzee nets almost as much. Experts warn that only about
120,000
common chimpanzees are left in central Africa's rain forests,
and
thousands are shot every year.
"It's
not much of a sport, because parts of this forest are so remote
that
the animals just sit there when they see you--they don't know to
be afraid,"
said Henk Hoefsloot, a WWF biologist based in Yokadouma.
"Not
even the Pygmies go into some parts of the jungle. This is the
Africa
not of a hundred years ago, but before the presence of human
beings."
That
extraordinary isolation is what ultimately lies on the chopping
block
of the loggers and poachers, experts say. In the utterly remote
rain
forest where the borders of Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of
Congo
and the Central African Republic converge, enormously diverse
animal
and plant populations have been buffered from outside
disturbance
since before the last Ice Age.
And
unlike the more famous Amazon, the Congo Basin bustles with large
animals.
Elephant populations are far higher here than in Africa's
celebrated
savannas. Moreover, a unique system of jungle clearings,
called
bais, functions as a remarkable magnet for wildlife.
"These
are the animals' gardens, where they all come to eat," said
biologist
Noupa, who has done surveys for the WWF in Cameroon's
southeastern
hinterland. "You look at them, and they seem like uniform
little
patches of grassland. But we've counted 110 species of grass in
one."
The
conservation community's campaigns to save this pristine, wild
heart
of Africa have been intense--and illuminate the enormous power
that
global environmentalism wields at the turn of the millennium, but
also
its uglier iniquities.
Prodded
by global conservation groups, the European Union and World
Bank in
August convened a meeting with Cameroonian officials to read
them
the riot act. Unless Cameroon got serious about cracking down on
the
devastating bush meat trade, the foreigners warned, further
development
funds would be frozen. Specifically at stake was $52
million
in EU money for road maintenance, a substantial sum in a
country
with a per capita annual income of $2,000.
Cameroon's
nationalistic newspapers were not alone in seeing the irony
in the
threat.
"Here
you have the developed world telling this poor country to shape
up,
while its own logging companies are the very ones opening up the
forests
to poaching," said Jaap Schoorl, the Cameroon field
coordinator
for the WWF, the world's largest environmental
organization.
"It seems we still haven't outgrown the old double
standard."
Cynical
or not, the fear of sanctions has stamped out the most blatant
signs
of the bush meat trade in Cameroon, where the problem is
rampant.
A huge bush meat market near the presidential palace in
Yaounde,
the capital, has been shut down. And the sale of endangered
species,
such as gorillas and chimps, has been forced underground.
Even
so, the resources and the will to stop the hunting do not exist,
especially
in a country recently rated the most corrupt in the world
by Transparency
International, an organization that promotes economic
accountability.
A
recent anti-poaching patrol by Cameroon's Ministry of Environment
and
Forestry in Yokadouma, the logging town, drove home that point.
Chief
ranger Mboh Dandjouma, a grave man clad in khakis and red penny
loafers,
had to borrow a truck from a German development organization
to set
up his surprise roadblocks on a logging road outside town.
Within
minutes, he stopped a bush taxi and confiscated a set of
pathetically
small elephant tusks, a pile of duiker antelopes and a
bloody
burlap sack filled with gut-shot monkeys: two mustached
guenons,
a spot-nosed guenon and a cloaked mangabey. The woman who
carried
the monkeys turned out to be the wife of a provincial member
of
parliament.
The
next bust, of a rickety bus, bagged more dead antelopes and
monkeys.
The passengers, clearly shocked at the novelty of having
their
bush meat confiscated, screamed abuse at Dandjouma and his
rangers.
"They
threatened to kill us," Dandjouma said with a sigh afterward,
beads
of sweat bulging on his forehead.
He
later explained that he and his 22 men are responsible for
patrolling
12,000 square miles of forest, an area about the size of
Maryland.
Dead monkeys, their long tails tied around their necks to
make
convenient handles, hang for sale along all the roads around
Yokadouma.
If the
stick of international sanctions is failing to stanch the
slaughter
in the Congo Basin, conservationists are using carrots as
well:
With promises of World Bank biodiversity funding and the distant
lure of
ecotourism profits, conservation groups have triggered the
biggest
parkmaking rush Africa has seen since colonial times.
In
Cameroon, the WWF is proposing three huge reserves that encompass
3,200
square miles of virgin rain forest, a region almost as big as
Yellowstone
National Park. Across the border in the Republic of Congo,
the New
York-based Wildlife Conservation Society has spearheaded the
creation
of the 1,500-square-mile Nouabale-Ndoki National Park. And
ECOFAC
and others are either announcing new parks or reviving old ones
in
Congo, Gabon and the Central African Republic.
Privately,
some of the wildlife biologists involved admit that a
fierce
game of public-relations one-upmanship--rooted in competition
for
donor funding--has marred the race to conserve Africa's last true
wilderness.
"There's
a lot of talk that goes into thin air," said a foreign park
planner
in Cameroon. "We don't cooperate, we don't even talk to each
other,
and a lot of effort gets duplicated."
Others
have criticized the proliferation of "paper parks" as
detrimental
to the conservation effort in the Congo Basin. Such
"protected
areas," announced with fanfare, get no institutional
backing,
slip into oblivion and end up eroding the credibility of all
parks
in the region. In a recent internal memo, the WWF even concedes
as
much: "There is presently no viable institution in place to manage
the
newly created Forest Parks. . . . the human and financial
resources
that the Government of Cameroon will be able to avail for
their
management is factually non-existent."
Nevertheless,
many conservationists, gazing out over the primeval rain
forests
where animals still do not fear human beings, see no other
choice.
"If
these areas don't have legal status--pfft!--10 years from now,
with a
new government, you'll have a logging concession," said the
WWF's
Schoorl. "This is humbling work. The truth is, we will never
keep it
all pristine. Not even a sizable fraction. Not unless we all
go back
to being Pygmies."
Which
in today's Africa, even Pygmies cannot do.
On the
side of a logging road churned into the consistency and color
of
orange pudding, Basile Simba said his people can no longer find
elephants
nearby. This is a problem because Jengi, the forest spirit
that
protects the Baka Pygmies, must be placated with elephant kills.
"Without
kills, we cannot dance, and Jengi has gone away," said Simba,
whose
clan has turned into one of the tendrils of the great, branching
pipeline
of bush meat feeding Cameroon's cities.
Simba
said he wanted more logging roads, so he and his hunters could
find
elephants. The thing he wants most in the world, he said, is a
shotgun.
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