Empty fishing nets off Ghana pushed hunters deeper into its forests
When foreign and local trawlers depleted West African fish stocks, people in Ghana turned to wild animals for protein. More than 30 years of records tie falling fish supplies to steep drops in 41 wildlife species. Across Africa, hunting for bushmeat now threatens 301 mammal species with extinction.
Bushmeat, originally an African term, means wild animals hunted to eat. For poor rural families in tropical forests it is a key source of protein and income, and hunting can be sustainable when traditional hunter-gatherers take animals across large territories for their own use. A study in South America's Tres Fronteras region even found that people who ate bushmeat had more iron, zinc and vitamin C in their diets and lower risk of anaemia. The trouble comes with commercial trade feeding city markets, which hits large, slow-breeding species hardest.
The scale is vast. Around the turn of this century, West and Central Africa traded an estimated 1 to 5 million tonnes a year, and the Congo Basin alone yields roughly 2.2 million tonnes annually. Globally more than 1,000 species are affected. Hunters mostly set leg-hold snares that catch anything but favour big animals for their meat. Logging roads and trucks give them access to remote forests; in Gabon, western gorilla and chimpanzee populations fell by an estimated 56 percent between 1983 and 2002, largely through hunting made easier by timber infrastructure.
Because fish and bushmeat substitute for each other, a shortage of one raises demand and prices for the other. In 2000 the IUCN World Conservation Congress urged affected countries to strengthen laws against unsustainable trade, and the phrase bushmeat crisis appeared in 2007 to describe the twin threat of vanishing food and vanishing species. Some logging firms, such as one in the Republic of Congo, now work with governments to regulate hunting in their concessions.
Handling wild animals also carries disease risk, highest during butchering. HIV most likely reached people through contact with infected primates, and Ebola outbreaks in the 1990s were linked to handling chimpanzees and bonobos. Yet between 1976 and 2014, Ebola jumped from animals to humans only about 30 times.
Source: Bushmeat
