In Congo forest, bushmeat trade threatens Pygmies

[phantom power]

Time has long stood still in the innermost reaches of northeast Congo's Ituri Forest — a remote and crepuscular world without electricity or cell phones that's so isolated, the Pygmies living here have never heard of Barack Obama or the Internet or the war in Afghanistan. But the future is coming, on a tidal wave of demand for game meat that's pushing an army of tall Bantu traders ever deeper into Africa's primordial vine-slung jungles.

It's a demand so voracious, experts warn it could drive some of Africa's last hunter-gatherers to eradicate the very wildlife that sustains them, and with it, their own forest-dwelling existence.

Over the last few decades, that existence has been vanishing at astonishing rates across the continent, as forests are ripped apart amid soaring population growth and legions of Pygmies are forced into settled lives on the outskirts of society.

One place — Congo's Okapi Wildlife Reserve — was supposed to be a bulwark against the onslaught, a place where commercial hunting is banned. But an Associated Press team that hiked two days to join one Pygmy band found the thriving bushmeat trade penetrating even into the protected zone.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38076131/ns/world_news-world_environment/

[Nihil]

1. I wonder why? Surely it isn't the same two reasons *again* is it?

> The fundamental problem: Congo's population — 70 million people and
> counting — is about three times what it was three decades ago.
> By 2020, it could reach 120 million.

Overpopulation? Check.

> The pygmies' traditional practice of hunting bushmeat has devolved into an
> all-out commercial endeavor - staged not for subsistence, but to feed growing
> regional markets.

Greed? Check.

That's the two main reasons why the world as a whole is in the state that it is.


> Some (forests) have suffered 90 percent drops in wildlife, stripped so bare,
> hunters have been reduced to eating their own hunting dogs

Shame that they haven't been reduced to eating other hunters instead.
At least that would help sort out the overpopulation problem.

[pscot]

2. This is very sad

They are eating our little brothers, and only evil can come of it.