Will Central Africa's Forest Wildlife Be Eaten into Extinction?

According to Scientific American, elephants, gorillas and other large forest mammals may become extinct in central Africa within 50 years if hunting meat to feed starving populations continues at the current pace. Each year, rural peoples consume some 2.2 billion pounds of so-called bushmeat from wildlife, the equivalent of four million cattle. Nathalie Van Vliet, a researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia says the problem is "if the people that currently rely on bushmeat as a source of protein in central Africa had to rely on livestock, we would see the same catastrophe that is destroying the Amazon Basin: deforestation for pasture land and livestock raising." Because of the failure of antipoaching programs, CIFOR argues that a hunting ban would not work. But it also says that forest species such as elephants, buffalo and apes that are slow to reproduce need to be protected or they will disappear entirely. CIFOR recommends local agreements that allow hunting of species that can rebound quickly (such as various species of duikers, a type of forest antelope) while not allowing kills of species with long gestation periods (such as elephants who give birth after 22 months). Granting local peoples a limited right to hunt while working actively to manage specific populations of animals in the jungle, may prove the only way to truly conserve, according to CIFOR and experts from the United Nations Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. "The question is conserving for whom?" Van Vliet asks. "For rural people that need to survive as well as for urban people that would love to see our fauna in the future—or just conserving for the sake of it?"