Wild meat: the bigger picture

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Abstract

Massive overhunting of wildlife for meat across the humid tropics is now causing local extinctions of numerous species. Rural people often rely heavily on wild meat, but, in many areas, this important source of food and income is either already lost or is being rapidly depleted. The problem can only be tackled by looking at the wider economic and institutional context within which such hunting occurs, from household economics to global terms of trade. Conservation efforts must be placed within a landscape context; a mosaic of hunted and no-take areas might balance conservation with continued subsistence use. Successful conservation of hunted wildlife requires collaboration at all scales, involving local people, resource extraction companies, governments and scientists.

Section snippets

The scale of the problem

Across the humid tropics, wild meat is being consumed on a massive scale. Humans have been hunting wildlife in tropical forests for 100 000 years or more, but consumption has greatly increased over the past few decades. Recent estimates of the annual wild meat harvest are 23 500 tonnes in Sarawak [4], 67 000– 164 000 tonnes in the Brazilian Amazon 5, 6, and 1 million–3.4 million tonnes in Central Africa 7, 8. Productivity of tropical forests for wild meat is at least an order of magnitude less

Bushmeat and wild meat

The word ‘bushmeat’ is widely used across West/Central Africa and, because the situation is currently reaching crisis levels in Africa, the term ‘bushmeat crisis’ tends to be used to describe overhunting of wildlife for human consumption in tropical areas. However, the implication that the problem is mainly a West/Central African one can be misleading. The 25 tonnes of turtles exported every week from Sumatra, Indonesia [21], 1500 forest rats sold per week in a Sulawesi market [22], and 28 000

Wild meat and development

Loss of wildlife through overhunting affects many types of people. Townspeople can be major wildlife consumers. The 80 000 townspeople of Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea, consume >100 000 kg of wild meat every year [10], and up to 90 000 mammals are sold annually in a single urban market in north Sulawesi, Indonesia [22]. One of the tragedies, however, is that the direct cost of wildlife loss falls most heavily on the rural poor, directly reducing the amount of animal protein available to them,

Wild meat and economics

A true understanding of the importance of wild meat can be gained only by putting it in the context of other sources of household income and subsistence, other opportunities in the local economy and local cultural beliefs. Only then can the processes of supply and demand be understood. One factor affecting the consumption of wild meat is the price and availability of substitutes. How these patterns of consumption change as consumers' economic circumstances change depends largely on how people's

Collaborating to solve the wild meat crisis

Collaborative multifaceted efforts are essential to solve the wild meat crisis, given that hunting is an integral part of rural economies, interacting as it does with other rural livelihood activities, such as logging, agriculture and fishing. An example of how this can work is the development of a Master Plan for Wildlife in Sarawak [29], which is based on long-term research and resulted in the passing and strict enforcement of a new law banning all trade in wild animals and their parts,

The role of research

Given the urgency of the crisis, and the rates at which wildlife populations are declining, we need immediate action. But we also need research and monitoring, to ensure that actions are having their desired effects. This is especially crucial given the complex ramifications of the issues involved. Minimum data requirements for assessing the sustainability of hunting are the population densities and productivities of hunted species and offtake rates by hunters. However, the difficult conditions

An emerging consensus

Individual conservation organizations and interest groups can have widely divergent views about the appropriate methods for tackling the wild meat crisis. But a consensus about the scale and potential repercussions of the crisis is emerging (Box 5), the key points of which are:

  • The need for effective protected areas is paramount if biodiversity is to be maintained in the face of unsustainable hunting.

  • Effectively enforced bans on the hunting of some particularly vulnerable species, such as the

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Nigel Leader-Williams and the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) for bringing us together at the SCB's 2002 Annual Meeting, which was co-hosted by the Durrell Institute of Conservation Ecology and the British Ecological Society.

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  • Cited by (0)

    This article is jointly authored by Kate Abernethy, Mohamed Bakarr, Elizabeth Bennett, Richard Bodmer, Justin Brashares, Guy Cowlishaw, Paul Elkan, Heather Eves, John Fa, E.J. Milner-Gulland, Carlos Peres, Callum Roberts, John Robinson, Marcus Rowcliffe and David Wilkie. It resulted from discussions linked to two symposia at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), co-hosted by the Durrell Institute of Conservation Ecology and the British Ecological Society. The SCB 2002 Annual Meeting Wild Meat Group is an informal group of some of the speakers who took part in this meeting, and is not linked to the SCB or any other organization.

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