Hunting for Consensus: Reconciling Bushmeat Harvest, Conservation, and Development Policy in West and Central Africa

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Diversity
Hunting for Consensus: Reconciling Bushmeat
Harvest, Conservation, and Development Policy in
West and Central Africa
ELIZABETH L. BENNETT,∗ERIC BLENCOWE,† KATRINA BRANDON,‡ DAVID BROWN,§
ROBERT W. BURN,∗∗ GUY COWLISHAW,†† GLYN DAVIES,†† HOLLY DUBLIN,‡‡ JOHN E. FA,§§
E. J. MILNER-GULLAND,∗∗∗ JOHN G. ROBINSON,∗J. MARCUS ROWCLIFFE,††
FIONA M. UNDERWOOD,∗∗ AND DAVID S. WILKIE∗‡‡‡
∗International Conservation, Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY 10460, U.S.A.
†Zoos and International Species Conservation, Global Wildlife Division, DEFRA, 1/16 Temple Quay House, 2 The Square, Bristol BS1
6EB, United Kingdom
‡CABS-Conservation International, 1919 M Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036, U.S.A.
§Overseas Development Institute (ODI), 111, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7JD, United Kingdom
∗∗Statistical Services Centre, The University of Reading, Harry Pitt Building, P.O. Box 240, Whiteknights Road, Reading RG6 6FN,
United Kingdom
††Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4RY United Kingdom
‡‡IUCN Species Survival Commission, Private Bag X7, Claremont 7735, Cape Town, South Africa
§§Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Les Augres Manor, Trinity, Jersey JE3 5BP, United Kingdom
∗∗∗Imperial College London, Division of Biology, Manor House, Silwood Park Campus, Buckhurst Road, Ascot, Berkshire, SL5 7PY,
United Kingdom
Introduction
From both conservation and development perspectives,
there is a bushmeat crisis. Yet there have been divergent
opinions among conservation and development agencies
in developed nations on the best practices and policies
to resolve this crisis in the bushmeat range states. To ad-
dress this issue a group of us met to share our knowl-
edge of the bushmeat issue and to reflect on growing
international concerns about the livelihoods and conser-
vation dimensions of the bushmeat trade. We examined
the problem from our varying disciplinary perspectives—
conservation science, social science, and environmental
policy—and arrived at the following consensus.
The development of bushmeat policy is ultimately a
matter for governments within nations where wildlife is
harvested for food. Nevertheless, contributions from con-
servationists and development agencies are often sought
and proffered. Yet these policy suggestions have only oc-
casionally been congruent, which has limited their utility.
‡‡‡Address correspondence to: D. S. Wilkie, 18 Clark Lane, Waltham, MA 02451-1823, U.S.A., email dwilkie@wcs.org
Paper submitted May 22, 2006; revised manuscript accepted August 1, 2006.
We believe there is a need for international development
and conservation agencies to adopt a more consistent and
supportive approach to bushmeat policy development.
Such an approach should seek to secure important global
biodiversity values while recognizing the livelihood di-
mensions of the trade and the practicalities of policy
change. Our consensus statement is only a first step; fur-
ther discussions must involve an array of stakeholders in
the range states.
Definition of the Bushmeat Crisis
Bushmeat is an African term that includes all wildlife
species used for food, from cane rats to elephants. The
ecological, nutritional, economic, and intrinsic values of
wildlife hunted for food are all atrisk of being lost because
present policies and practices cannot reconcile these dif-
ferent values of bushmeat or manage the resource sustain-
ably. The dual threats of wildlife extinctions and declining
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2Bushmeat Harvest in Africa Bennett et al.
food and livelihood security of some of the poorest peo-
ple on Earth make the trade in bushmeat a national and
global conservation and development concern, warrant-
ing the phrase bushmeat crisis.
Whether the hunting of bushmeat is primarily an issue
of biodiversity conservation or human livelihood, or both,
varies with perspective, place, and over time. It is crucial
to understand when and where the bushmeat trade is
primarily a livelihoods issue, a biodiversity conservation
crisis, or both. Without this knowledge decision makers
cannot reform policies and practices so that these differ-
ent, but equally important, values of wildlife are not lost
through inaction. Worse still, benefits may be lost as a
result of conflicting actions of the development and con-
servation communities.
In much of West Africa populations of many large-
bodied wildlife species have already declined or been
extirpated because of habitat loss and hunting, leaving
a fauna consisting predominantly of resilient, rapidly re-
producing species. In these places the “crisis” has more
of a livelihood dimension: the need to ensure that the
poor have access to affordable protein sources, and the
few remaining populations of threatened and endangered
wildlife species are protected. The wildlife species that
remain in these primarily agricultural ecosystems are of-
ten crop pests, and they are hunted for food and to reduce
crop losses.
In more remote regions of Central Africa the bush-
meat crisis is currently more of a conservation issue. In
many places wildlife in aggregate is still abundant. Yet
wildlife species that are scarce and breed slowly—such
as gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, and bongo—are at
risk of local extinction. Although hunting for household
consumption may be locally sustainable, the level of ex-
tralocal demand associated with the commercial trade in
bushmeat is typically far greater than the forests can sup-
ply. Because hunters typically kill large animals when they
encounter them in the forest, these species will be driven
to extinction as long as there are enough small wildlife
species to continue to attract commercial hunters to the
forest. The concern is that as the scale of wildlife trade in
Central Africa increases to meet rising demand, wildlife
populations will be quickly depleted, and not only will
some globally important wildlife populations be lost, but
many rural people will lose an important source of food
and income. Marginalized groups and indigenous peoples
who cannot easily compensate for the loss of income from
wildlife harvesting by entering conventional labor mar-
kets are especially vulnerable.
Depletion of wildlife and loss of livelihoods of local
people are issues that sit on either end of the bushmeat-
wildlife continuum, and they reflect a complex mixture
of concerns. Finding and implementing development and
conservation policies and practices that are complemen-
tary and that reconcile the different values of wildlife to
people is the challenge that faces national and interna-
tional decision makers if the multifaceted bushmeat crisis
is to be solved.
Reasons for the Bushmeat Crisis
Conservationists ( but not animal rights people) and devel-
opment planners agree that harvesting bushmeat at levels
that are sustainable would be ideal. Reconciling what is
sustainable in theory with what is likely to be manageable
in practice remains a key challenge.
Large-bodied, slow-reproducing species are usually
scarce, and hunting makes them especially prone to ex-
tinction. Defining sustainable harvest levels in places with
high numbers of endemic species with very restricted
ranges is challenging because loss of local populations
could have global significance. Other species such as the
blue duiker (Cephalophus monticola) and cane rats (Thy-
ronomys swinderianus) reproduce more rapidly and are
capable of sustaining much higher levels of offtake. As
a result, prospects for sustainable use of these relatively
common, small, and resilient species are brighter.
Just as there are differences among species, there are
differences in the productivity of different ecological sys-
tems. Wildlife productivity in tropical forests is generally
low, and typically the quantity of bushmeat that could be
harvested each year is an order of magnitude less than
from much more productive tropical grasslands. On the
other hand wildlife productivity in forest regenerating af-
ter shifting cultivation tends to be higher than in primary
forests. Finally, in some places habitat loss, fragmentation,
pollution, and disease contribute further to declines in
wildlife numbers and reduction in sustainable harvest lev-
els.
In Africa, although laws typically exist that regulate
hunting and sale of wild animals, in practice wildlife
hunted for food is usually an unregulated open access
resource that anyone with the time and equipment can
harvest. Land management and tenure systems that would
give rural communities a say in access to and disposi-
tion of natural resources are lacking in much of Central
and West Africa. Rural families often have few assets on
which to rely, and existing natural assets are increasingly
depleted or claimed by more people amid rapid human
population growth. Wildlife harvested for food is a valued
good that is subject to growing demand when supply is
either static or declining. Consequently, in many rural lo-
cations in Central and West Africa where there are few
barriers to entering the bushmeat trade and few alterna-
tives to offset demand, hunting pressure is increasing and
wildlife populations are declining or being extirpated.
The Bushmeat Crisis and Development
Bushmeat is a development issue because many types
of development decisions or actions lead to crisis. The
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poor and most marginal are vulnerable to three kinds of
changes: depletion, degradation, and shocks. Depletion
occurs when there is less of any resource (for bushmeat,
fewer species or reduced populations), whereas degra-
dation pertains to a decline in quality (e.g., loss of more
favored species). Shocks are the result of unexpected and
often external factors (war, economic crisis, drought) that
rapidly change the conditions people face. One of the
most important roles bushmeat play in the economies of
poor people is as a safety net against these short-term
livelihood crises. These negative environmental changes
may not be the result of the actions of the people most
affected. Usually, the drivers of these changes are actions,
policies, and decisions taken or made by actors far away
from where the impacts occur (i.e., infrastructure and
concession policies).
In many areas unsustainable exploitation of bushmeat
is the result of the failure of development policies that
have led to an absence of rural-sector investment or sus-
tained income opportunities in rural areas. Development
actions, such as road construction into frontier forests,
can bring about a rapid stripping of resources, and the
people who reside in these areas see their assets and liveli-
hood security diminish rather than increase. Rural people
may be pushed off their lands because they typically lack
secure land rights and the ability to enforce them. Lack
of long-term integrated planning compounds the risks to
poor people from ill-considered development.
Finally, bushmeat overexploitation and loss is a develop-
ment problem because it encompasses issues of sectoral
and intergenerational equity. Where bushmeat markets
are booming, poor rural communities are often mining
their wildlife resources to subsidize the protein consump-
tion costs of urban families. The failure of development
to provide growing urban populations with secure liveli-
hoods and sustainable sources of animal protein are re-
sulting in overharvesting of wildlife in rural areas and de-
creased livelihood security of poor rural families who are
dependent on a dwindling wildlife resource. Bushmeat
harvest is more a survival strategy than a development
strategy. The places where species are threatened pin-
point places where development policies have failed, and
the future of the rural poor is likely to be threatened as
well.
Managing for All Values of Wildlife
Wildlife species are valuable for the roles they play in
regulating the composition, abundance, and productivity
of plants and animals within the planet’s diverse ecosys-
tems. To many people they are also intrinsically valuable
and convey a profound sense of the wonder of nature.
Wild animals are valuable for the food on people’s plates
and the money in people’s pockets. Unfortunately, many
in the conservation and development communities have
seen these values of wildlife as conflicting with each other
and thus as mutually unattainable. This has been espe-
cially true in discussions of the tropical forests of Central
and West Africa, where wildlife conservation, bushmeat
harvest, and human livelihood concerns overlap in com-
plex ways.
A large part of the conflict has stemmed from inher-
ently flawed attempts to obtain all values of wildlife from
a single place at a single time. The challenge for policy is
to accommodate these different values in ways that sup-
port diverse needs and interests. If we want to capture
all the values of wildlife we must think about wildlife
management at a large enough spatial scale. Through this
magnifying lens one can imagine a large heterogeneous
landscape with three very different types of land uses:
high biodiversity protected areas, production forests, and
farm bush areas. Although no single area captures all val-
ues, if managed in concert a well-planned landscape can
generate the ecological, livelihood, and existence values
of wildlife simultaneously.
Protected areas include national parks, biological re-
serves, and other areas in The World Conservation Union
(IUCN) management categories I and II. These are es-
sential elements of a wildlife conservation strategy, and
a nation’s full array of species should be represented in
its protected areas network. These protected areas should
have biodiversity conservation as their primary objective,
taking precedence over all other values of wildlife, and
no hunting should be allowed within them. The species
within these strictly protected areas are of both national
and international concern and include protected and en-
dangered species. Other categories of protected areas
(IUCN III-VI) have management objectives that address
both livelihood and conservation concerns.
Production forests are designated for natural resource
production and harvesting. In production forests hunting
of wildlife species that are not protected (e.g., not on na-
tional protected species lists and/or not on the IUCN Red
List) should be allowed and managed sustainably. The nat-
ural resources within these areas represent national-level
interests and values, and management standards and sup-
port for their effective management should stem primarily
from private-sector investment and national mechanisms.
Farm bush areas are mosaics of agricultural fields,
tree crop plantations, fallow lands, and locally protected
forests. They are the primary source of cultivated and
wild harvested goods that are the foundation of rural
livelihoods. In farm bush areas bushmeat provides di-
verse local benefits and is important to rural livelihoods.
Sustainability and support of local livelihoods should be
the primary purpose of these areas. Wildlife species not
specifically protected or threatened with extinction (e.g.,
not on national protected species lists or on the IUCN
Red List) should be managed locally, and the rights of
local users to harvest wildlife should be ensured. When
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protected species are present, their management should
involve both local and national managers. The natural re-
sources within these areas primarily have local value.
Moving Forward
To ensure that management of wildlife in protected areas,
production forests, and farm bush is sufficiently effective
to capture its ecological, livelihood, and existence values,
a set of other actions are required. At present, political
will to address the bushmeat trade is inadequate. Current
capacity for wildlife law enforcement is limited, although
some projects have shown that it is possible to regulate
transportation and sale of bushmeat. Moreover, finding so-
lutions to the challenges of bushmeat management is un-
likely to be possible solely within the wildlife and natural
resources sector. We must engage the development, pub-
lic health, and private sectors to play their roles and en-
sure that their actions complement direct conservation in-
terventions. These include supporting appropriate land-
use management and land and resource tenure, putting in
place appropriate legal frameworks, and strengthening of
community participation in resource management. These
actions all provide a useful opportunity and entry point
for another key link between bushmeat and development
policy: the strengthening of governance and institutions,
which is a cross-sectoral concern throughout sub-Saharan
Africa. If a well-governed bushmeat sector were achiev-
able, then this would have far wider repercussions than
in the wildlife management field alone.
Acknowledgments
This consensus statement was made possible by J. E.
Fa who organized and hosted a meeting at the Durrell
Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey.
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