United Nations report identifies innovative solutions for resolving bushmeat crisis

Montreal, 25 October 2011 – A new United Nations report says resolving the crisis in the harvesting of bushmeat is possible if governments combine new management models, including community-based management, game-ranching and hunting tourism, with new mechanisms for monitoring and law enforcement.

The report, Livelihood Alternatives for the Unsustainable Use of Bushmeat (CBD Technical Series No. 60) prepared for the Bushmeat Liaison Group of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), with assistance from TRAFFIC and financial support from the European Union, comes at a time when the overexploitation of wild mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians is increasingly threatening food securityand livelihoods in many tropical and subtropical countries and is a major cause of biodiversity loss. The report can be found online at: http://www.cbd.int/doc/publications/cbd-ts-60-en.pdf.

International and domestic commercial, and often illegal, trade in the meat and other parts of wild animals (“bushmeat”) is growing significantly and is replacing legitimate subsistence hunting. Together with population growth, poverty in rural areas and increased urban consumption, the absence of livelihood alternatives to bushmeat hunting and trade is a major factor contributing to unsustainable levels of bushmeat harvesting.

Key recommendations of the report include:

· Implement community wildlife management and other improved wildlife-management approaches, such as game-ranching and hunting tourism;

· Increase raising of “mini-livestock'”(wild animals such as cane rats raised in small farms);
· Support sustainable harvesting of non-timber forest products, for example, through bee-keeping.

The report also recognizes the need to clarify and define land-tenure and access rights, improve monitoring of bushmeat harvesting and trade, and enhance bushmeat-related law enforcement. The findings are the results of discussions by 55 experts representing 43 Governments and United Nations agencies, international and national organizations, and indigenous and local-community organizations, who met in Nairobi from 7 to 10 June 2011.

Participants in the meeting recognized that classic approaches and international efforts are not reversing this growing trend of unsustainable bushmeat harvesting, and adopted a set of recommendations to the international community and to concerned national Governments and stakeholders.

Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said: “I trust that this publication will encourage concrete action to halt the overharvesting of bushmeat and the loss of biodiversity, and thus maintain essential ecosystem services and improve the quality of life for the rural poor in tropical and subtropical countries.”