The Actual and Potential Contribution of Forest Wildlife to Food Security and Poverty Alleviation

0906-A1

Douglas Williamson^[1]

Abstract

It is estimated that wildlife delivers significant benefits to 150 million poor people, including many who depend on forests. The paper analyses these benefits. However, the use of wildlife is often unsustainable, threatening the welfare of the people who depend on it. Yet forest wildlife retains a capacity to contribute to future food security and poverty alleviation and there are many ideas about what could and should be done to maintain this capacity. The paper looks at ideas for action at local, national, international and global levels and concludes with a list of salient points about the contribution of wildlife to food security and poverty alleviation.

Introduction

In this paper “food security” is understood in terms of its definintion in an interagency paper on household food security, namely that “Households are considered food secure when they have year round access to the amount and variety of safe foods their members need to lead healthy and active lives. Thus, household food security has three key dimensions, the availability of food, access to food, and utilization of food.” (IFAD/FAO/WFP 2000)

Poverty is a relative term which means different things in different places. In this paper it refers to a situation in which people lack the resources to make adequate provision for the basic necessities of life and to cope with predictable shocks such as illness and food scarcity. “Poverty alleviation” is thus seen as a process, such as income generation, which increases the capacity of people to make provision for the basic necessities of life and to deal with predictable shocks.

In terms of these definitions, forest wildlife clearly has the potential to contribute to both food security and poverty alleviation. It can contribute to food security directly by providing animal protein, or indirectly by providing income which can be used to purchase food. It can contribute to poverty alleviation directly by serving as a means of generating income, or indirectly, when it is harvested to provide food at no financial cost, thus allowing money that would have been spent on food to be allocated to other uses.

What is the actual contribution of forest wildlife to food security and poverty alleviation?

A recent review of hunting in tropical forests [Robinson and Bennett 2000a] provides a general answer to this question: “wild animals ... are ubiquitously harvested by rural peoples living in and around tropical forests. Meat from wild mammal, bird and reptile species provides much of the animal protein needs of rural peoples around the world. Harvested animals are also an important economic commodity. The high value of meat relative to its bulk means that meat is frequently transported to local and urban markets ... and is a major source of cash for many rural peoples.” [Robinson and Bennett 2000b, at page 15]

More precisely, the Wildlife and Poverty study implemented by United Kingdom’s Department for International Development estimates that wildlife provides significant benefits to up to 150 million poor people [DFID 2002]. But wildlife delivers negative as well as positive livelihood outcomes [Table 1], although the negative outcomes are often the result of the occupation of existing wildlife habitat by expanding human populations.

Bushmeat is one of the main sources of human benefit. The actual amount of bushmeat being harvested is difficult to quantify because the harvest is mostly informal and illegal, but it is clearly enormous. In Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, it was estimated that in 1996 around 120,000 tonnes of wild meat was harvested by over a million hunters [Caspary 1999a]. This was more than twice the yearly production of meat from domestic livestock, and its market value of around US$ 150 million represented 1.4% of the gross national product. The amount of bushmeat being harvested in the Congo Basin has been variously estimated as 1.2 million tonnes [Wilkie and Carpenter 1999], 2.5 million tonnes [Barnett 2002], 5 million tonnes [Fa et al. 2002]. These numbers support the wildely held view that wild meat is an important component of the dietary intake of many people [e.g. Barnett 1997, Caspary 1999a and 1999b, Caspary et al. 2001, Hofmann et al. 1999, Ntiamoa-Baidu 1997, Ojasti 1996, Roth and Merz 1997].

Table 1: Livelihood Outcomes delivered by Wildlife

Acess to the benefits of bushmeat is obviously no less important than the existence of these benefits. One study [Eves and Ruggiero 2000] found that access to bushmeat for consumption was correlated with income - the more income the more access. Similarly, in the case of the sale of meat for cash it is those hunting and trading on their own account who benefit most. For example, Pygmies hired by gun owners to hunt receive benefits that amount to only around a half of the low average hourly rate [US$ 0.39] for unskilled workers in the region [Eves and Ruggiero 2000], while on the other hand, for some independent commercial hunters annual income ranges from $250 to $1000 [Davies, 2002]. These findings indicate that securing access to the benefits of bushmeat for the poorest of the rural poor is an issue that needs to be investigated in more detail.

Wildlife tourism, including trophy hunting, is a second important contributor to the livelihoods of the rural poor. For example, in 1996 trophy hunting alone contributed $225 million to the economies of South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe [Elliott and Mwangi 1998]. Wildlife tourism has the potential to contribute much more than it currently does to the rural poor because they often benefit only marginally from it. Increasing the level of benefits from wildlife tourism to the rural poor is thus a crucial challenge.

How sustainable are the benefits derived from forest wildlife?

Ghana and Cameroon are among a number of countries in which bushmeat supplies are already heavily depleted and in many countries common resources like bushmeat are declining, with important implications in terms of reduced livelihood flexibility and increased vulnerability [DIFID 2002].

The conclusion reached in the global survey of hunting in tropical forests mentioned earlier [Robinson and Bennett 2000a] was that: “in tropical forests throughout the world today, hunting rates for many species generally are clearly not sustainable.” [Robinson and Bennett 2000c, at page 519]

Barnett [2002] reaches a similar conclusion in relation to wildlife around the world, in all habitats, inside and outside protected areas. He also draws attention to species around the world that are particularly threatened by the bushmeat trade: antelopes and primates in Africa; freshwater turtles, reptiles and pangolins in South East Asia; peccaries in South America.

In some cases there is quantitative evidence of the decline. For example in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, in four years the highland sector of the park lost more than 95% of its elephant population and about 50% of its gorilla population [Yamagiwa 2003]

According to Bowen-Jones et al. [2001] the underlying causes of wildlife depletion include:

• major policy and market failures, in that the price of bushmeat fails to acknowledge the scarcity of the resource and the potential cost of its replacement;

• the generally informal and illegal manner of its harvesting;

• policies and laws that are unconducive to sustainable management;

• loss of habitat, often due to the results of extensive poverty, corruption, poor law enforcement and weak governance.

A further underlying cause of wildlife depletion is the widespread failure to appreciate that tropical forests around the world support a relatively low mammalian biomass and that forest wildlife is thus a limited resource. It has been estimated that these forests can therefore sustainably meet the animal protein needs of only one person per square kilometer [Robinson and Bennett 2000b]. In the face of persistent human population growth one of two things must therefore happen. Either a declining proportion of the population can sustainably meet all their protein needs from forest wildlife, or everybody will be able to sustainably meet a smaller proportion of their protein needs from forest wildlife.

In the Congo Basin the rural human population is already 12 people per square kilometer, while in the Amazon Basin the figure is 2 people per square kilometer [Fa et al. 2002]. Even if one uses the lowest estimate of the amount of bushmeat being harvested in the Congo Basin - 1.2 million tonnes - this still implies a level of consumption more than six times what is believed to be sustainable.

The deployment of increasingly potent hunting technology, such as shotguns and wire snares, and the opening up of forests to hunting by logging roads are also widely associated with unsustainable wildlife use.

In sub-Saharan Africa conflict, governance and poverty are major factors. In East Asia rapid economic growth is driving mass demand for wildlife. In South America in the areas inhabited by the native people of the neotropics, compulsory sedentarization of native populations and incursions or circumsubscription by settlers are generally among the factors that undermine the sustainability of wildlife use [Stearman 2000].

At a local level culture can be a potent factor. In a study of hunting in Central Africa Noss [2000, at page 301] found that: “On the cultural side, neither group of hunters exhibits a conservation ethic in the exploitation of wildlife. They are opportunistic predators rather than conservationists ...: they capture as many animals of any species, sex, and age as they can.”

One species of primate has already been hunted to extinction in West Africa, but extinction is not just an African problem. Twelve species of mammal have disappeared from the forests of Vietnam since 1975 [Whitfield 2003]

Maintaining and realizing the potential of forest wildlife to make future contributions to food security and poverty alleviation

Despite the widespread depletion of forest wildlife, it retains a capacity to contribute to poverty alleviation and food security because there remain substantial tracts of relatively intact forest in places like the Amazon Basin and the Congo Basin, and because depleted wildlife populations can recover if given the time and space to do so.

Much thought has been and is being given by academics, conservationists, managers and scientists around the world to what can be done to secure a sustainable future for wildlife which continues to deliver benefits to poor people. There are now many ideas about what can and should be done to achieve this aim. These ideas encompass projected activities and measures at local, national, international and global levels.

At the local level the crucial issues are to relieve local people of the burden of bearing the costs of maintaining wildlife and to generate tangible benefits for communities. To these ends community based natural resource management [CBNRM] is widely advocated. In practice its implementation can be slow and expensive and it is not always a feasible option. The degree of community involvement ranges from, on the one hand, limited consultation by management authorities to, on the other hand, complete community control of resource management. In these circumstances a variety of approaches and tools are being deployed in efforts to maintain the wildlife resource, of which examples include the following:

• Management of subsistence hunting based on an understanding of the biology of prey species and the factors that influence hunter’s prey choice, and a management style which is flexible and sympathetic to local community values and priorities [Fitzgibbon et al. 2000]

• Alliances between native cultures and conservation organisations [Stearman 2000]

• Working with hunters with the short term aim of increasing the sustainability of their hunting methods and the ultimate aim of providing alternative sources of food and income to reduce or eliminate their dependence on hunting [Noss 2000] o Giving exclusive hunting rights in an area in return for the implementation of a wildlife management plan [Fimbel et al. 2000]

• Establishing conservation villages in which some villagers are protected area employees, and therefore have an income, and around which hunting laws and regulations are enforced [Eves and Ruggiero 2000]

• Using simple theoretical models to estimate the sustainable offtake for individual species [Whitfield 2003]

In the longer term continued human population growth and shrinking forests mean that probably the best hope for forest wildlife is to develop alternative food sources for local people [Whitfield 2003].

At the national level salient issues include the establishment of policies, laws and institutions that are conducive to sustainable management of natural resources, including wildlife, and the inclusion of wildlife in key policy processes. Effective empowerment of local people and involvement of all stakeholders, including civil society, NGOs and the private sector, in the process of resource management are widely seen as key elements of sustainable resource management.

At international/regional and global levels public goods are a central issue. Public goods have three attributes: they are non-rival [can be consumed by many without becoming depleted], they are non-excludable [it would be inordinately difficult to limit use to one or a few persons], and they require collective action to match supply and demand. In the context of cross border migration and wildlife tourism, wildlife may be seen as an international public good. In the sense of providing biodiversity option values and species existence values, wildlife may be seen as a global public good. International or global public goods may be affected by national level policy failures, require collective action, and are often supplied poor countries. International development agencies thus recognize that that there is an urgent need to improve the supranational mechanisms for managing international public goods and are concerned with the need to pay for the associated costs of collective action and compensating the poor for the cost of supplying international and global public goods [DFID 2002].

With respect to global wildlife public goods, the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [GEF] have committed over $ 7 billion to biodiversity projects, which is a step in the direction of compensating poor countries for the cost of supplying global wildlife public goods. But their investments are piecemeal and ad hoc and are long way from constituting a systematic global mechanism for compensating poor countries for supplying global wildlife public goods and thus providing them with a durable incentive for conservation.

Conclusions

Salient conclusions that can currently be drawn about the contribution of wildlife to food security and poverty alleviation are as follows:

• wildlife delivers significant livelihood benefits to around 150 million poor people, many of whom are dependent on forests;

• the main sources of benefit from wildlife are bushmeat and wildlife tourism, the latter have significant potential to increase the level of benefit it delivers;

• in many places the wildlife resource is being depleted and in a number of developing countries it is already severely depleted;

• although poor people adapt to reduced access to wildlife, the depletion of wildlife resources diminishes their livelihood flexibility and increases their vulnerability;

• both because of the benefits they currently deliver and because of their potential to deliver increased benefits through wildlife tourism, countries would benefit from programmes to manage their wildlfe resources sustainably;

• to achieve this, actions and measures are needed at national, international/regional and global levels.

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