REFUGEES LINKED TO WILDLIFE DECLINE

[Anonymous]

Refugee link to wildlife decline
Conservation groups say they have found an unusual threat to East Africa’s wildlife – hunting by hungry refugees.
A
report from the wildlife trade monitoring body Traffic says wild meat
is covertly traded, cooked and consumed in Tanzanian refugee
camps.Traffic suspects species affected may include chimpanzee, buffalo
and zebra.Tanzania hosts more refugees than any other African nation, a
legacy of conflicts in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of
Congo.The UN says there are more than half a million refugees in the
country, mainly living in camps near the western border.The border is
also home to important wildlife refuges such as Gombe National Park,
which achieved international fame as the site of Jane Goodall’s
pioneering studies of chimp behaviour.

Basic ‘failure’
In its
60-page report, Traffic says the refugees are turning to wildlife
because agencies supplying food are not providing meat.”The scale of
wild meat consumption in East African refugee camps has helped conceal
the failure of the international community to meet basic refugee
needs,” said the report’s principal author Dr George Jambiya.”Relief
agencies are turning a blind eye to the real cause of poaching and
illegal trade – a lack of meat protein in refugees’ rations.”The World
Food Programme (WFP), which supplies food to more than 200,000 refugees
in Tanzania, said it did not believe there was a big problem.A survey
conducted last year showed little response to a question on whether
refugees were obtaining food from hunting, gathering or fishing.”The
refugees are given a balanced diet of cereals, dried beans,
vitamin-fortified blended food, vegetable oil fortified with Vitamin A
and iodised salt,” a WFP spokesman told BBC News.”To continue to meet
the nutritional requirements of the refugees with meat as suggested by
the report would require substituting canned meat for the much less
expensive beans that we currently provide.”This would almost double the
budget for food provision, WFP calculates.

Tale of decline
Traffic
admits that the real scale of the hunting problem is not known, but
offers a raft of observational evidence and first-person testimony to
back its case.In 1994, when intense ethnic fighting in Rwanda drove an
estimated 600,000 refugees into the area of Tanzania surrounding Burigi
National Park, wildlife in the park declined sharply.Buffalo numbers
fell from about 2,670 to just 44. Roan antelope declined from 466 to 15
and zebra from 6,552 to 606, while the estimated population of 324
Lichtenstein’s Hartebeest, a type of antelope, vanished
completely.Similar trends have been found in other parks near camps.

And
when camps have closed, numbers have often recovered.Long-time
residents of camps, meanwhile, told researchers that a clandestine
network of hunters and processors continues to supply illegally caught
wild meat.Traffic, which is a joint operation of the World Conservation
Union (IUCN) and WWF, recommends that refugee agencies and the
Tanzanian government look for ways to increase the supply of meat
protein to the refugees.Livestock rearing, ranching of wild species,
and regulated hunting are all measures that could help provide a
sustainable supply of meat in some areas, the agency says. 

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January 22, 2008 at 12:32 PM