Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Making development in the tropics more sustainable

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Nowhere is the intersection of nature and culture more apparent than in tropical communities developing around forestry.  One of the outcomes of opening the forest to logging is the expansion of killing wild mammals for food—sometimes primates closely related to humans, such as gorillas and chimpanzees.  This is known as the bushmeat trade. And logging roads provide easy access for legal and illegal hunters.

Although bushmeat hunting often makes the news (examples 1, 2, 3), we seldom hear about the underlying demographic and social factors that interact with bushmeat harvests.  Learning more about these factors can empower us to develop sustainable solutions that slow or halt the loss of biodiversity.

In the Early View edition^1,2 of Conservation Biology, Poulsen and colleagues examined the interaction between logging towns and bushmeat harvests in Congo.

For six years, they followed animal harvests and meals to see what controlled the rate of bushmeat harvests.

Their results were interesting…

• The development of logging (often driven by tropical wood demand in developed nations for items like furniture) led to a human population increase of 69% in these towns.  These people were mainly foreigners and migrants from other parts of Congo, often attracted by the public services (electricity, water, hospitals) offered by forest companies.
• The supply of bushmeat rose 64%, concurrent with the population rise.
• Bushmeat consumption followed this trend: foreigners > migrants > indigenous communities.
• Logging workers with higher salaries drove the bushmeat market in several ways.  First, they consumed more.  Second, they had the income to purchase guns.  Third, they often lent firearms to indigenous communities, sharing the resulting bushmeat harvest, part of which the workers sold to gain a second source of income.  As the authors noted, “It is often the market sale of the meat by the gun owner, and not consumption of wild foods, that can be most important to households living in extreme poverty.”
• Similar to other studies, the consumption of bushmeat was inversely related to the availability of fish, meaning that people were trading off sources of protein.  When fish were abundant (during the dry season), people ate fish; otherwise they turned to bushmeat.
• The authors suggested that locating frontier logging communities where there are no easily obtainable alternative sources of protein (like fish) results in a positive relationship between human population growth and bushmeat consumption.
• When frontier cities grew large, hunting pressure intensified and spread throughout the watershed.

So how can tropical frontier development become more sustainable?   The authors offer several suggestions:

• The bushmeat problem is one of ensuring affordable sources of protein to poor people.
• Logging companies (and the rest of the private sector) need to be engaged so that their activities begin to align with conservation efforts.
• Industry can play a role in conservation by
  • importing and ensuring consistent sources of protein for their workers;
  • helping finance law enforcement to protect wildlife and transport licensed hunters along roads;
  • ensuring that their workers hunt legally;
  • establishing formal hunting zones in land planning, with priority access to indigenous communities;
  • restricting logging roads to logging vehicles only and closing roads not in use to discourage illegal hunting;
  • avoiding urbanization near logging sites.  Mills and factories should be built near existing cities away from the frontier to avoid population growth in the forest interior.

¹Poulsen, J.R. et al. (2009) Bushmeat Supply and Consumption in a Tropical Logging Concession in Northern Congo. Conservation Biology (Early View).

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarah_mccans/ / CC BY 2.0