INTERVIEW - Loggers must be encouraged to save African forests
Date: 29-Aug-02
Country: SOUTH AFRICA
Author: Ed Stoddard
"We must engage the logging firms as well as governments to preserve the forests," Goodall, a 68-year-old Briton, told Reuters in an interview.
Goodall, a United Nations "Messenger of Peace" famed for her studies of chimpanzees in Tanzania, is in Johannesburg for the 10-day U.N. Earth Summit that started on Monday.
"We (the Jane Goodall Institute) are starting to talk to the logging companies in the Congo basin about reducing the number of roads they cut and other issues," she said.
The Food and Agricultural Organisation estimates that Africa's total forested area declined by a rate of 0.78 percent each year between 1990 and 2000.
Scientists are especially concerned about the disappearance of the biologically rich forests in west and central Africa.
Goodall said the damage inflicted by logging firms was not restricted to trees. "When they build a road into the forest they give access to all sorts of people including hunters in the bush meat trade," she said.
"They hunt not just the primates but everything, even the bats. And it is not to feed starving people. African 'bush meat' is served as a delicacy in expensive restaurants in Africa and even Europe and America," she said.
PYGMIES' WAY OF LIFE THREATENED
Goodall said loggers were also engaged directly in the bush meat trade, hiring local pygmies to hunt wildlife to supply meat to their workers.
"We must get the loggers to stop encouraging the hunting of local wildlife to feed their workers and get them to find alternative sources of protein," she said.
"It is unsustainable. When they finish in an area and pull out, there are no animals left, and the pygmies' whole way of life is then threatened," she said.
Humanity's closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, are among the animals threatened by the illicit trade in wild meat and the loss of the forests.
"It's terrible...the number of chimpanzees in the wild a century ago was around two million and is now around 200,000 and some people think the number is even less," she said.
Goodall said they were mere "relics" in most of the 21 nations where they still live, small groups clinging on against an onslaught of human encroachment. Some of their biggest populations are found in Gabon, Cameroon and the two Congos.
Lowland gorillas number only a few thousand while there only a few hundred mountain gorillas left. The latter are found in bamboo thickets on lush volcanic hills that straddle the unstable borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Goodall said she was pleased with a U.S. initiative to protect the rain forests in the Congo basin and promote job-generating eco-tourism.
She said there were still some remote and untouched forests in the region and that limited, upmarket tourist access could create jobs, giving local communities a vested interest in preserving habitat and wildlife.