PROBLEMS IN THE CONSERVATION OF RAINFORESTS IN CAMEROON

Abstract

The economic crisis and structural adjustments from late 1980s to early 1990s accelerated logging operations and agricultural expansion in Cameroon, which resulted in a massive destruction of the tropical in the southeastern part of the country. As such a destruction was posing local as well as global environmental problems, and attracted international attention, various projects have been promoted to save the ecosystems in Cameroon. While some of these projects are attempting new conservation measures, emphasizing active participation by local inhabitants, they are still facing difficulties for several reasons. This essay first examines the problems involved in the Western protectionism and nature aesthetics that prevailed in the conservation schemes of the last century. It also demonstrates that the new types of conservation attempts in the area, such as community forest and adaptive management, have not attained satisfactory results yet, due largely to insufficient information of the multiplex relationships between people and nature in the ecosystem and of complex ethnic relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers in the area. In order to properly understand the relationships of people with in a wider social and economic context, three types of ecological investigation are proposed here; (1) cultural ecology, to show how people's life and culture depend on the and its resources, (2) historical ecology, to evaluate short- and long-term impacts of human activities on the environment, and (�) political ecology to illustrate the relationship between the forest-related activities on the local level and the political and economic situations on the national and international levels. The tropical rainforests of the Congo Basin cover an area of approximately 170 million hectares, and constitute the world's second largest tract of rainforests after that of the Amazon River Basin. These forests are said to be relatively simpler than those in Southeast Asia and South America in terms of the diversity of constituent tree species, tree height, and structure; but, nonetheless, the African rainforests are magnificent, as they have as many as 60 to 70 different tree species per hectare. These rainforests have rich mammal faunas, in particular of primates and ungulates, and are well known for being habitats to endangered species such as gorillas and chimpanzees. This rich expanse of forests is now rapidly shrinking. The pace of degradation is especially rapid in countries with relatively stable political situations, such as Cameroon and Gabon.