Yaounde, Cameroon, Africa. December 2010 (Cameroon News) – Efforts have been launched to control illegal poaching and large scale killing of animals in order to put a control on species becoming extinct at double fast speed in Cameroon Africa.
WAR AGAINST POACHING IN CAMEROON Africa bush meat
It is no exaggeration to say that you will find anything at the Nkolndongo Market, Yaounde.
There is a specific corner in this busy market where you will get he choicest chunk of bush meat. If you think that the wares stop there you are wrong because the list has only begun.
Half the jungle is sold there wherein you find stalls where snakes longer than an average human being, striped civets, antelopes, lethal looking porcupines, antelopes and all varieties of monkeys are sold in the open market.
But the saddest part is that there is no saying where the meat come s from or whether it is lawful by any means.
Cameroon World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) / World Wildlife Fund Cameroun
“There are people who come and sell it to us,” said a woman named Natasha, who deals in smoked antelope meat. “I don’t know where they come from. They just come from the bush.”
Natasha o for that matter most of the others who deal in the trade do not even realize that the butchered animals whose meat the sell in the open market are part of species fast nearing extinction.
But they cannot do anything about the whole issue when not just the meat that they sell but also the stalls that they use are illegal.
“I am waiting for the day when I might have a problem with the authorities,” Natasha said.
She is not hiding her trade or her stall from anyone neither has she been evicted from her position next the the fat lady who deals in wriggly, plump fat palm larvae.
But she is waiting the day when she could just be asked to move out of her comfortable corner in a lot of apprehension.
This situation is not just something that is just exclusive to Natasha. In fact you may find lots of people like her in all markets of Cameroon.
central market marche centrale douala yaounde cameroon cameroun
The Central African country is rightly referred to as the representative subset of Africa, with desert, meadows, mountains and the Congo Basin rainforest.
But just as many forests are there is popular hunting and illegal poaching in every one of them.
Natasha’s antelope meat might have well been stolen from the foothills of Mount Cameroon, near the Gulf of Guinea, where the particular species of antelopes are protected from being endangered.
John Ngomba who is employed here as a mountain guide, tells his customers that there are lots and lots of elephants, gorillas and herds of antelope here. But just as strong a possibility is running into a herd of poachers or hunters.
“One time I saw a hunter with two antelopes,” Ngomba said. “But it was impossible to carry them. So he decided to slaughter them and then dry them.”
Ngomba states that his tourists have been scared off and repelled by the sight of poachers slaughtering the porr animals and smoking their meat right in the middle of the dense forest. He says that the animals who are not killed also disappear somewhere into the wild for fear if being caught.
“When the animals see people, they go very far away,” Ngomba said. “Because they know they are trying to kill them.”
The World Wildlife Fund has determined that bush hunters have taken the lives of over one million tons of wild game a year spanning all of Central Africa.
And that doesn’t take into account animals whose lives are taken for skins, tusks or other body parts, or the more fortunate ones if you can call them that who are safely taken out of their original habitat and smuggled overseas.
Hunting is illegal in Cameroon and there are numerous laws governing the same. It is strictly against law to murder animals or hunt them in national parks. There are specific laws governing the number if animals that can be trapped and the types of arms that can be employed for the same.
But critics feel that there’s one major issue.
“It’s not well-regulated,” said Germain Ngandjui, of the Cameroonian office of the wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC. Ngandjui narrates an oft repeated tale story: Cameroon has proper laws, he said, “but there are weaknesses in law enforcement.”
Ngandjui states that if highly endangered species like gorillas are on sale at local markets it obviously means that something is wrong somewhere.
In 2009, TRAFFIC determined that hunting in Cameroon is at many times double the permissible levels.
WAR AGAINST POACHING IN CAMEROON Africa bush meat
Shockingly, people who are supposed to take care of Cameroon’s laws have a totally different perspective. Cameroon’s Director of Wildlife, Philip Tabi Tako-Eta, said he thinks his country’s government cannot do any better with the resources it has at its disposal.
Tabi Tako-Eta said the government is deploying its minimal resources to put a curb on illegal hunting, and that field staff throughout the country are synergizing with conservationists and villagers in specifically attacking poachers.
“The war is on,” Tako-Eta said. “We will not say the poachers are winning or that we are winning. A war is never won by one battle. Today they might have a battle where the poachers win, and tomorrow we might defeat them in other battles.”
Desire Foguekem, who is employed with the World Wildlife Fund’s office near Campo Ma’an National Park, in southern Cameroon can feel the pressures of the drive mounting up.
Campo Ma’an’s more than 1000 square miles of forests and is the habitat to numerous species of animals that are fast approaching extinction including elephants, hippos and gorillas. But in spite of the restrictions poaching is still very rampant in this region.
And Foguekem said that the pilferage happening in the park’s budget have made it impossible to keep at protection and anti poaching efforts.
“When anti-poaching activity is going on in the park on a regular basis, poaching activities reduce” Foguekem said. “When there is a lack of the budget, poaching activity increases tremendously.”
But in spite of the budget concerns, Campo Ma’an park ranger Raphael Fouda said these anti-poaching patrols are creating the right kind of impact. Fouda said that before these efforts were deployed, local people would poach whenever and wherever they wanted to.
“At the beginning, everyone was poaching without knowing what they were doing. It was just to live,” Fouda said. “With the patrols, we have tried to get people to understand conservation.
At some point, many people understood our goal and joined in. Others rebelled and stayed poachers. So we continue to pursue them so that they too come to understand.”
Fouda indicates that the trouble is not caused just by the local poachers. He states that poachers come down into the jungles of Cameroon from the neighboring countries like Equatorial Guinea to hunt for animals.
There are also many others who come into these jungles under the pretext of carrying food for the workers who work at the logging areas and rubber plantations in the vicinity of the reserved forest.
Fouda is in fact making a reference about people like Jeannot Nbessolo, an unnaturally lean man with ragged and dirty clothes who was recently taken in for poaching in Campo Ma’an Park but seems highly unlikely of ever having indulged in it. But after all appearances can be deceptive at times.
At first Nbessolo said that he did not own the rifle that he was having in his possession but was just carrying it for someone else, along with a couple of cartridges.
Then he agreed with a weary look in his face that he had been poaching but only to get a special gift for his mother in law. When questioned once again he changed his stand and said that he was a poor man and wanted to pay his children’s school fees from the money he got out of poaching.
“I’m truly sorry,” Nbessolo said. “I’m sorry if I broke the law. I just went to look for rats.”
Nbessolo agreed that he had also tried a hand at shooting and killing one of the many parakeets to use it for dinner later during the day..
To judge which of these stories are true would be a near impossible task not just in this case but in most others as well which also indicate a similar pattern. But one thing that is for sure is that these efforts are very rampant in the country and is on an alarming increase.
Yaounde, Cameroon, Africa
That’s why Park ranger Raphael Fouda claims that it is not a dream that anti-poaching efforts alone will tackle the issue completely, how much ever money may be deployed towards it. He said people in the country were using poaching just like they would any other job in order to make a living.
Elsewhere in Cameroon, organizations have been specifically addressing those issues, by providing the people alternative means of earning a living like beekeeping and farming. But here in the Campo region, Fouda said, people cannot wait anymore.
“People are leaving for the forest again, he said. “And it’s really a problem. On the whole, I will tell you that the hunting pressure is again very heavy in the park. And for me that’s really troubling.”
