The Bushmeat Crisis Task Force (BCTF)

Abstract

There is an immediate and rapidly growing threat to the future of Africa’s irreplaceable wildlife: the unsustainable, often illegal, unregulated commercial harvesting of wildlife for meat, also known as the bushmeat trade.1 A multi-billion dollar industry, bushmeat is now the most significant threat to wildlife populations, including great apes, in Africa today (Bennett et al., 2002b). Complex interactions between extractive industries (logging, mining, oil), transportation systems (roads and railroads), human population growth, absence of dietary alternatives, lack of governmental infrastructure, and widespread poverty have resulted in a rapid increase in the commercial trade in wildlife for meat. The commercial bushmeat trade results in the depletion of a wide range of wildlife, ranging from largeto small-bodied species. Due to their relatively low productivity, tropical forests are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of the commercial wildlife trade. The result is that, while forests may remain intact, they may be nearly devoid of wildlife—a phenomenon that has been termed the “empty forest syndrome” (Bennett et al., 2002a). The African bushmeat crisis affects a broad range of taxa, including endangered and threatened species. Hunting targets include great apes, elephants, duikers (forest antelope), other primates, rodents, reptiles, and birds. Dramatic reductions in common prey species also affect a number of carnivores (Ray et al., 2002). While Africans have hunted wildlife for many millennia, it is only recently that the crisis has arisen as growing urban populations have commercialized the trade. The massive off-take of wildlife has subsequently become unsustainable. In the Congo Basin alone, harvest estimates for all species combined Chapter 17 The Bushmeat Crisis Task Force (BCTF)