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- THE CONGO BASIN RAIN FOREST,
Cameroon -- In the steamy twilight of the jungle, Gilles Bokande hunkered
beside a mossy stump and pinched his nose between his index and middle
fingers. Blowing air through the back of his throat, he bleated like a
duiker, a tiny forest antelope.
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- Nothing happened.
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- Trudging a mile deeper into Africa's largest remaining
rain forest, Bokande crouched and tried again. Still no response.
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- The animals don't come anymore when Bokande, a Baka Pygmy,
calls them. A fresh logging road snakes nearby--a muddy funnel that siphons
away not only the forest's primeval hardwoods but also thousands of wild
animals poached for the dinner tables of urbanites in the burgeoning cities
of Cameroon.
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- "It's harder to find antelope, gorillas, chimpanzees
and elephants," said Bokande, a pleasant, wiry man whose teeth are
filed to sharp little points. "The forest is getting quieter now."
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- Across Africa, a remorseless silence is falling over
the far untamed corners of a continent that long has symbolized wild nature
to a jaded, overindustrialized world.
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- In places such as the famed gorilla reserves of Uganda,
where conservationists are desperately trying to link the needs of dwindling
wildlife with those of land-hungry farmers, it is the silence of nature
drowned out by the babble of human overpopulation. In countries such as
Kenya and South Africa--which grimly lead the continent with 59 and 141
endangered species--it is the quiet absence of wild animals outside of
zoolike national parks. And in hot spots like Angola and Congo, it is the
pitiable hush that comes after the massacres of wild animals amid terrible
civil wars.
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- But here, deep in the lush rain forests of central Africa,
that deadened stillness is even more ominous because it heralds the outside
world's final assault on the last true wilderness left on the continent.
In a rain forest second only to the Amazon in size, environmentalists are
girding themselves for one of the defining conservation battles of the
21st Century: saving an African frontier so wild that its animals don't
run away because they have never seen humans before.
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- "This is the holy of holies," said World Wildlife
Fund biologist Paul Noupa, one of the conservationists scrambling to set
up wildlife sanctuaries so remote that they probably won't have visitors
for years. "If we fail to preserve this place, we can only blame ourselves.
All over Africa, you have a long history of conservation. Not here. Here
we are starting from scratch, and the clock is ticking."
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- Until recently, time was of little consequence in the
vast rain forest that stretches from Nigeria east to Rwanda.
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- About a third as big as the continental United States,
it was a forgotten refuge for Africa's densest concentrations of animals
and for the Pygmies who hunted them with arrows and spears. But since the
early 1990s, a timber rush spearheaded by European logging companies has
kicked off a classic story of greed and exploitation--a tale that includes
an unprecedented slaughter of monkeys, an unseemly turf battle among conservation
groups, and a cynical developed world that wants to have its rain forest
and eat it too.
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- Logging and hunting have gone hand in sweaty hand in
the Congo Basin for as long as anyone can remember. But both activities
have exploded for reasons few could have foreseen.
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- The depletion of west Africa's forests, where Europe
traditionally bought its tropical hardwoods, has launched a stampede of
French, German and Middle Eastern logging companies into the more inaccessible
jungles of central Africa. At the same time, a regional economic crisis
has only accelerated the timber boom: Local currency devaluations in the
mid-1990s effectively halved the cost of hauling 800-year-old trees through
hundreds of miles of forest to the parquet-flooring and furniture-making
markets of Europe and Japan.
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- In Cameroon, wood production soared 50 percent between
1992 and 1997, the last years for which figures are available.
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- Strapped for cash because of slumping cacao exports,
the government has gratefully seized the $60 million-a-year lifeline created
by logging revenues. The story is the same in neighboring Gabon, where
declining oil production is stoking the logging trade and where the president,
Omar Bongo, owns 500,000 acres of prime timber concessions.
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- But just as Mercedes-Benz logging trucks have begun rumbling
in earnest along the Congo Basin's new mud highways, the public's appetite
for wild animal meat surged in the teeming cities of Cameroon, Gabon, Congo
and the Central African Republic.
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- Elephants, antelopes and monkeys have been a staple of
local villagers' diets for millenniums, of course. But Africa's swelling
urban populations, nostalgic for village foods and flush with money, have
turned a subsistence activity into a burgeoning, multimillion-dollar industry.
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- Newly extended logging roads have become bush meat pipelines
plied by poachers who snare and shoot anything in sight. Many logging companies
encourage the hunting because it also saves on the cost of shipping beef
into the remote jungle towns where their workers live.
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- "We know it's a problem, and we are even planning
to raise a herd of cows for workers to eat," said Thibaut Fuchs, the
sawmill manager of the Forestry Association of Cameroon, a French-Cameroonian
logging company that selectively harvests mahogany, sapeli and ebony from
200,000 acres of jungle. "But it's an uphill battle. People here say,
'You've got to be kidding! Why raise cows? The forest is ours, and the
wild animals are everywhere!' "
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- In hundreds of town markets like the one in Yokadouma,
a logging center set like a grubby island in the middle of southeastern
Cameroon's oceanic canopy of trees, about a dozen vendors specialize in
selling wild animal carcasses. Antelopes, skinned and trussed, look like
small greyhounds frozen in mid-stride. Elephant meat is hacked into 2-pound
cubes. And smoked sections of an animal's large intestine--possibly from
a forest buffalo--look like a charred fire hose.
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- "The bush meat trade is the No. 1 threat to biodiversity
in the Congo Basin," said Conrad Aveling, director of ECOFAC, a European-funded
environmental group based in Gabon. "A logging road goes in, and five
years later there isn't a single large animal left in the forests. Thousands
of square kilometers have been hunted clean. We're talking about tons and
tons of animal meat, including organized shipments that go across the borders
of Gabon and Cameroon."
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- Hit especially hard, environmentalists say, is the Congo
Basin's rich diversity of primates. Monkey meat is prized as a status food
among urban elites. Endangered gorillas can bring $100 on the wild-meat
market. A chimpanzee nets almost as much. Experts warn that only about
120,000 common chimpanzees are left in central Africa's rain forests, and
thousands are shot every year.
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- "It's not much of a sport, because parts of this
forest are so remote that the animals just sit there when they see you--they
don't know to be afraid," said Henk Hoefsloot, a WWF biologist based
in Yokadouma. "Not even the Pygmies go into some parts of the jungle.
This is the Africa not of a hundred years ago, but before the presence
of human beings."
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- That extraordinary isolation is what ultimately lies
on the chopping block of the loggers and poachers, experts say. In the
utterly remote rain forest where the borders of Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic
of Congo and the Central African Republic converge, enormously diverse
animal and plant populations have been buffered from outside disturbance
since before the last Ice Age.
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- And unlike the more famous Amazon, the Congo Basin bustles
with large animals. Elephant populations are far higher here than in Africa's
celebrated savannas. Moreover, a unique system of jungle clearings, called
bais, functions as a remarkable magnet for wildlife.
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- "These are the animals' gardens, where they all
come to eat," said biologist Noupa, who has done surveys for the WWF
in Cameroon's southeastern hinterland. "You look at them, and they
seem like uniform little patches of grassland. But we've counted 110 species
of grass in one."
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- The conservation community's campaigns to save this pristine,
wild heart of Africa have been intense--and illuminate the enormous power
that global environmentalism wields at the turn of the millennium, but
also its uglier iniquities.
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- Prodded by global conservation groups, the European Union
and World Bank in August convened a meeting with Cameroonian officials
to read them the riot act. Unless Cameroon got serious about cracking down
on the devastating bush meat trade, the foreigners warned, further development
funds would be frozen. Specifically at stake was $52 million in EU money
for road maintenance, a substantial sum in a country with a per capita
annual income of $2,000.
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- Cameroon's nationalistic newspapers were not alone in
seeing the irony in the threat.
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- "Here you have the developed world telling this
poor country to shape up, while its own logging companies are the very
ones opening up the forests to poaching," said Jaap Schoorl, the Cameroon
field coordinator for the WWF, the world's largest environmental organization.
"It seems we still haven't outgrown the old double standard."
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- Cynical or not, the fear of sanctions has stamped out
the most blatant signs of the bush meat trade in Cameroon, where the problem
is rampant. A huge bush meat market near the presidential palace in Yaounde,
the capital, has been shut down. And the sale of endangered species, such
as gorillas and chimps, has been forced underground.
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- Even so, the resources and the will to stop the hunting
do not exist, especially in a country recently rated the most corrupt in
the world by Transparency International, an organization that promotes
economic accountability.
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- A recent anti-poaching patrol by Cameroon's Ministry
of Environment and Forestry in Yokadouma, the logging town, drove home
that point.
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- Chief ranger Mboh Dandjouma, a grave man clad in khakis
and red penny loafers, had to borrow a truck from a German development
organization to set up his surprise roadblocks on a logging road outside
town. Within minutes, he stopped a bush taxi and confiscated a set of pathetically
small elephant tusks, a pile of duiker antelopes and a bloody burlap sack
filled with gut-shot monkeys: two mustached guenons, a spot-nosed guenon
and a cloaked mangabey. The woman who carried the monkeys turned out to
be the wife of a provincial member of parliament.
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- The next bust, of a rickety bus, bagged more dead antelopes
and monkeys. The passengers, clearly shocked at the novelty of having their
bush meat confiscated, screamed abuse at Dandjouma and his rangers.
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- "They threatened to kill us," Dandjouma said
with a sigh afterward, beads of sweat bulging on his forehead.
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- He later explained that he and his 22 men are responsible
for patrolling 12,000 square miles of forest, an area about the size of
Maryland. Dead monkeys, their long tails tied around their necks to make
convenient handles, hang for sale along all the roads around Yokadouma.
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- If the stick of international sanctions is failing to
stanch the slaughter in the Congo Basin, conservationists are using carrots
as well: With promises of World Bank biodiversity funding and the distant
lure of ecotourism profits, conservation groups have triggered the biggest
parkmaking rush Africa has seen since colonial times.
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- In Cameroon, the WWF is proposing three huge reserves
that encompass 3,200 square miles of virgin rain forest, a region almost
as big as Yellowstone National Park. Across the border in the Republic
of Congo, the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society has spearheaded
the creation of the 1,500-square-mile Nouabale-Ndoki National Park. And
ECOFAC and others are either announcing new parks or reviving old ones
in Congo, Gabon and the Central African Republic.
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- Privately, some of the wildlife biologists involved admit
that a fierce game of public-relations one-upmanship--rooted in competition
for donor funding--has marred the race to conserve Africa's last true wilderness.
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- "There's a lot of talk that goes into thin air,"
said a foreign park planner in Cameroon. "We don't cooperate, we don't
even talk to each other, and a lot of effort gets duplicated."
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- Others have criticized the proliferation of "paper
parks" as detrimental to the conservation effort in the Congo Basin.
Such "protected areas," announced with fanfare, get no institutional
backing, slip into oblivion and end up eroding the credibility of all parks
in the region. In a recent internal memo, the WWF even concedes as much:
"There is presently no viable institution in place to manage the newly
created Forest Parks. . . . the human and financial resources that the
Government of Cameroon will be able to avail for their management is factually
non-existent."
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- Nevertheless, many conservationists, gazing out over
the primeval rain forests where animals still do not fear human beings,
see no other choice.
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- "If these areas don't have legal status--pfft!--10
years from now, with a new government, you'll have a logging concession,"
said the WWF's Schoorl. "This is humbling work. The truth is, we will
never keep it all pristine. Not even a sizable fraction. Not unless we
all go back to being Pygmies."
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- Which in today's Africa, even Pygmies cannot do.
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- On the side of a logging road churned into the consistency
and color of orange pudding, Basile Simba said his people can no longer
find elephants nearby. This is a problem because Jengi, the forest spirit
that protects the Baka Pygmies, must be placated with elephant kills.
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- "Without kills, we cannot dance, and Jengi has gone
away," said Simba, whose clan has turned into one of the tendrils
of the great, branching pipeline of bush meat feeding Cameroon's cities.
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- Simba said he wanted more logging roads, so he and his
hunters could find elephants. The thing he wants most in the world, he
said, is a shotgun.
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