As Central African leaders meet in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, this weekend to discuss threats to the region’s vast forests, the size of the world’s ”second lung” keeps diminishing at an alarming speed.
The rain forests of the Congo Basin cover an area of approximately 2,3-million square kilometres, which includes a third of the forests of the continent. This makes it the second-largest area of tropical forests in the world after the Amazon in South America.
The area is also home to about half of the continent’s animal species, which include the threatened forest elephants, chimpanzees and the entire world’s population of lowland gorillas.
It also boasts more than 10 000 plant species.
But the global conservation body WWF says that if the deforestation continues at the present pace, two-thirds of the forests may disappear in less than 50 years.
Other serious threats to the forests and its animals are poaching and smuggling of wildlife.
Experts have said that the illegal bush-meat trade in Africa is the most serious threat to the continent’s wild animals.
”The African bush-meat trade is huge. Tonnes and tonnes of wild animal meat [are] trucked into the urban centres, and a good deal is shipped to other African countries and to other continents,” the famous primatologist Jane Goodall told the Smithsonian magazine in its last issue.
Breathing life into treaty
This weekend’s meeting, which will be attended by leaders from the seven countries concerned — Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon — will try to breathe life into a conservation treaty signed in 1999, but which has made little progress since then.
In principle, financial aid from Western donors and credit organisations for conservation projects has been slow in coming, as there is disagreement over who should manage the money — the recipient governments or the donors.
It has been estimated that $1,6-billion is needed for the period 2004 to 2013 to preserve the huge but shrinking forests and its unique fauna.
So far, only France and the United States have made donations to the project. French President Jacques Chirac, currently on an African tour, is also scheduled to take part in the meeting in Brazzaville.
The discussions over the weekend are expected to centre on how to settle fund-management disagreements, and how to secure necessary future funding for the conservation project.
Since the 1999 conservation agreement, new protected forest areas have been created and countries in the region have started joint patrols to safeguard endangered wildlife, but the WWF says it is far from enough.
It says more efficient border controls must be created, and local communities must be included in the conservation efforts.
Involvement of locals
Jacques Ela Nko’o is an obvious example of how the involvement of locals can help save the forests and the animals.
He was born and grew up in Campo-Maan, an area in the south-western corner of Cameroon, bordering Equatorial Guinea to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west.
Campo-Maan was made a national park in 2000. It houses several ethnic groups, among them the Bagyeli pygmies who live in settlements in the forest.
The park is also home to mammals considered to be threatened species, among them the forest elephant, leopard, gorilla and chimpanzee, as well as birds threatened with extinction.
When Jacques finished his studies he could not find a job, so in order to survive, he started poaching. He killed both gorillas and elephants.
”At that time, you did not run the risk as there were no guards,” he said.
But after a while, he decided to become a forest guard. Later, he was employed by the WWF conservation project in Campo-Maan, taking advantage of his knowledge of poaching and poachers in his work for the organisation.
But poachers still work the forests, and they don’t want people in their way. Jacques was recently attacked by a group of poachers he had spotted, and they cut off one of his hands with a machete.
”Attempts to save the forests of the Congo Basin will only succeed if adequate funding is secured to back up strong political decisions,” Dr Claude Martin, director general of the WWF, said ahead of the meeting in Brazzaville. — Sapa-DPA