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Bushmeat hunting occurs in many of the world’s tropical forests and is a key component of many peoples' livelihoods in this zone. Within the last 15 – 20 years, much of this hunting has become increasingly unsustainable. Much hunting was previously often largely subsistence in nature, employing local, relatively low impact, technologies and carried out by relatively small numbers of long-term forest-resident peoples. However in recent years, the nature of bushmeat hunting has radically changed, becoming - as a wide range of experts now argue - heavily unsustainable. The causes of this transformation are complex but include:
 Opening up of isolated forest areas through logging activity & infrastructure development - vast areas of tropical forest have been opened up for logging. Roads and bridges have been built into previously very isolated tracts of forest that have brought these remote forest areas and their peoples intonew or much closer contact with the cash economy, modern consumer products and urban markets. Conversely, recently opened up forest frontier areas have often been newly settled by substantial numbers of frequently landless migrant people seeking new livelihoods and/or employment opportunities with logging operations.
Monetisation of economies - many forest peoples, until very recently, have had predominantly - or solely - exchange-based economies. As these remote forest exchange-based economies have become monetarised, people wishing to access new goods and services may begin to over-exploit their natural resources in a bid to successfully engage in the monetarised economy. Thus, in regard to bushmeat hunting, previously unavailable market opportunities have arisen for local and new immigrant hunters that have provided an incentive to increase as well as commercialise part or all of their hunting. With the involvement of outside entrepreneurial business patrons, an increasing amount of hunting is carried out in order to supply urban markets as well as timber-logging settlements.
Changes in hunting technology - with access to new, non-traditional and far more efficient hunting technologies, hunters have been able to harvest the fauna of tropical forests at rates that experts acknowledge as already being widely beyond sustainable levels. Moreover, traditional hunting technologies often necessitated the hunter identify and then approach each animal to close proximity before it could be taken. In contrast, modern hunting technologies (especially snares and jack-light shooting) are largely employed in a non-discriminatory manner such that there may frequently be higher levels of wastage and endangered species may be made more vulnerable.
Militarisation of forest areas - many tropical forest areas have recently been or are currently major war-zones. Resident forest peoples' livelihoods are often severely disrupted by war and further complicated by mass influxes of refugees fleeing combat areas. Previously sustainable forest exploitation practices may radically change as migrant populations with access to military firearms quickly over-harvest local wild animal populations.
Discentives for its management - poverty is prevalent throughout much of the tropical forest zone and people are continually forced to pursue unsustainable short-term natural resource harvesting strategies at the expense of long-term sustained benefits from these resources. Other contributory factors that compound the adverse effects of poverty are insecure and insufficient tenure and access to land and resources. Furthermore, endemic rent seeking - part of wider governance issues - in tropical forest areas, often linked with pervasive levels of poverty, provides discentives for the effective implementation of necessary natural resource management practices and procedures.
Changes in the macro-economic environment - a substantial proportion of countries in the tropical forest zone have suffered from substantial economic stasis and decline, resulting in lower levels of governance and service provision, especially for the poorest. With high levels of poverty, depressed agricultural markets and employment conditions, people have creatively engaged increasingly in the quasi-illegal informal economy, part of which is the bouyant bushmeat trade.
Under-valuation of the resource - while far from restricted to tropical forests, the continued undervaluation of natural resources further contributes to their over-exploitation, higher levels of consumption and insufficient returns to the producer as a result of market distortions.
Population growth and socio-ecological change - as many forest peoples have increasingly become sedentary and exposed to greater contact with the outside world, their population growth rates have increased markedly often as a result of access to modern health care, and changes in their socio-biology - for example, higher levels of energy intake in their diets and increased family sizes. Incoming immigrants further add to localised population growth in forest frontier areas. Further, as a result of a range of circumstances, many formerly mobile forest peoples have found themselves becoming sedentary and settling in permenant villages. Localised forest areas around these settlements which previously would have been left to regenerate, are now increasingly unsustainably exploitated by neighbouring sedentarised communities.
Increasing rates of urbanisation and thus high rates of urban population growth create very substantial and significant natural resource demand shadows over out-lying forest areas hundreds of kilometres distant.
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Today, bushmeat off-take rates from the forests of Amazonia, Central and West Africa as well as those of East Asia are massive. Estimates, while difficult to undertake and thus likely to be imprecise, nevertheless provide some indication of the extent of bushmeat hunting and the ecological crisis which many experts now recognise it has become.
Examples:
South America: It is estimated that annual wild animal consumption in Amazonas State, Brazil in the late 1980s was 2,800,000 mammals, 531,000 birds and 500,000 reptiles (Robinson and Redford, 1991a).
West Africa: In Liberia, during the late 1980s, bushmeat production was estimated at 165,000 tonnes per year – including both subsistence and commercial production (Anstey, 1991).
Central Africa: Bushmeat consumption is estimated at between 1-5 million tonnes per annum.
East Africa: The small Arabuko-Sokoke coastal forest (372km2) in Kenya, annually provides 130,000kg of bushmeat to surrounding communities (FitzGibbon et al., 2000).
South-east Asia: In Sarawak, subsistence hunters eat a minimum of 23,513 tonnes of wild meat per year (Bennett et al., 2000).
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Much of the fauna hunted in these forests is mammalian, is from a number of families and includes a diverse range of species of antelopes, small and large rodents, carnivores, primates and others (for example, elephant, barbirusa and ant-eaters). However, different forest mammal species populations are more - or less - able to withstand hunting pressure.
Some species, especially those that are able to thrive in secondary vegetation and farm-fallow-low forest systems are often able to tolerate relatively high and sustained off-take rates. Many of these species, for example the larger rodents and some of the small antelopes, often have reasonably high intrinsic rates of reproduction, generalised habitat requirements and thus populations tend to be more robust. Most of these species populations are not vulnerable and therefore are not of immediate biodiversity conservation concern.
Many other species are far more vulnerable - in particular most of those species only able to survive in one or more types of old-growth forest habitats. Many of these species tend to be the larger antelopes and primates (but there are a number of other families affected as well), which have low intrinsic rates of reproduction, and have undergone, as a result of bushmeat hunting, substantial localised and regional population declines. Specific species may be more - or less - vulnerable to hunting depending on their behavioural and socio-ecology. The vulnerability of such species may be made more acute when, by chance, hunters encounter and opportunistically harvest any remaining individual(s) of a depleted population while hunting for other (economically viable) species.
Furthermore, many of these species are sensitive to changes in forest composition and structure brought about as a result of logging which often attracts higher levels of bushmeat hunting, even after logging has been completed. Thus, when the impact of continued extensive conversion of old-growth forest to secondary is taken into account together with much increased levels of bushmeat hunting, the threat to the survival of these species is very considerable and the long term prognosis does not bode well.
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The decline of many antelope
and primate populations in particular, has resulted in many
experts expressing grave reservations, not only for the
long term status of individual species, but also for the
functionality of forest ecosystems. Many of the affected
species play important ecosystem roles in tropical forest
ecology - not least that of seed dispersal. Species, whose
populations have declined locally to a low level, may often
become locally extinct on their own as a result of their
inability to reproduce sufficiently quickly. Moreover, even
where a species persists at a locally low density, ecologists
have recognised that such a population often does not fulfil
its ecosystem function and is therefore, in ecological terms,
already extirpated.
The ecological impacts of hunting on forest mammals have been increasingly researched and documented by wildlife biologists in recent years. A key and extremely informative publication, amongst others, is Robinson and Bennett (2000).
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Bushmeat hunting, if current trends continue, will have a major, adverse and direct impact on tropical forest mammalian bio-diversity in the coming decade. Moreover, the long-term indirect negative impact on wider forest biodiversity as a result of reduced or extirpated tropical forest mammalian populations, while difficult to elucidate, is nevertheless a tangible prospect.
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Bibliography
Anstey, S. 1991. Wildlife
Utilisation in Liberia. Gland, Switzerland: World Wide
Fund for Nature and FDA Wildlife Survey.
Bennett, E.L. Nyaoi, A.
and Sompud, J. 2000. Saving Borneo's Bacon: The Sustainability
of Hunting in Sarawak and Sabah. In: Hunting for Sustainability.
Eds. Robinson, J.G. and Bennett, E.L. pp305-324. New
York: Columbia Press.
FitzGibbon, C.D., Mogaka,
H. and Fanshawe, J. 2000. Threatened Mammals, Subsistence
Harvesting, and High Human Population Densities: A recipe
for disaster? In: Hunting for Sustainability. Eds.
Robinson, J.G. and Bennett, E.L. pp154-167. New York: Columbia
Press.
Robinson, J.G. and Bennett,
E.L. Eds. 2000. Hunting for Sustainability. New
York: Columbia Press.
Robinson, J.G. and
Redford, K. 1991a. Neotropical Wildlife Use and Conservation.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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