If you ask 10 people, you will most probably get 10 differing solutions, each with its own merits or demerits. Some solutions may be practical, some may not. The big question is will any of them have such a profound effect on the Bush Meat problem that it will be able to stem the over utilisation, and allow species numbers to start moving back into healthy proportions in future.
Well if the answer is no, then it is not really a solution, but merely a delay of the inevitable.
Consider the impact of stopping unsustainable commercial logging, after all logging is the route cause of the Bush Meat crisis. I think we will all agree that if this one thing could be accomplished, it would have a profound impact on the future of Bush Meat!
On our own we cannot do an awful lot, but what we can do, is get the wheels in motion, get other interested and affected parties to accept this as a potential solution, motivate more powerful organisations to work together, to pool resources, and attack the problem from all fronts.
Your Support of Bush Meat Crisis Africa will help create education programmes for corporate, schools, Zoos & Aquaria and also to create a network of outreach programmes to involve the communities.
After all, if the all powerful Swiss Bankers could be called to book for being an ally in custodianship of the plunder of the Holocaust, and the greatest mining Giants Anglo America and De Beers can be called to book, then surely:
Those companies who have raped and plundered the forests, destroyed the bio-diversity, slaughtered the animals, and deprived inhabitants of their heritage and birthright, for a fist full of gold, can also be brought to book.
Forests continue coming under growing pressures. Ten years ago, the forests in the Congo for example were virtually untouched; however, today logging operations are shrinking these forests at an alarming rate. It is estimated that logging is deforesting World forests at a rate of 6,000 square meters a second.
Central Africa’s forests cover 1,863,000 km2, of which 68% is in large contiguous blocks. However, it is important to underscore that the situation is rapidly changing for the worse, because 41% of those pristine areas have been allocated to commercial logging concessions.
Cameroon is by far the worst off from logging, between 1990 and 2000, over 9 million hectares of forest was cleared in Cameroon alone. Issued logging concessions cover 76% percent of Cameroon’s total protected and unprotected forests. Look at this in contrast to the period between 1959 and 1990 when only 6% of Cameroon’s unprotected forests had been allocated for logging.
The most sought after legal logging licence is known as “ventes de coupe”. Ventes de coupe licence holders are entitled to log an area of 2,500 hectares of the permanent forest over a three-year period. Due to the short-term nature of the title, and the lack of requirement for any management plan, the forests are often logged in a highly destructive manner. These titles are also frequently abused to organise illegal logging over a much larger area.
We need to create awareness, as the more people who know, and start thinking and talking the same language the easier and faster this is going to start.