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The west develops a taste for bushmeat
10:35 08 July 2006
> From New Scientist
Susan Brown

MEAT from wild primates killed in Africa is landing on dinner plates
in North America and western Europe. Offered for sale in clandestine
markets from Los Angeles to Paris, primates make up nearly a third of
the illegal international trade in bushmeat, according to a survey of
markets in seven cities.

Rumours of the existence of such markets have floated around for
years, says wildlife biologist Justin Brashares of the University of
California, Berkeley. Confirmation came from a chance encounter with a
taxi driver from Ghana two years ago. When asked if he missed eating
bushmeat, the driver said, "I don't, really." He then offered to show
Brashares a market in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, where
bushmeat is sold.

"I was shocked that open markets sell large quantities of African
bushmeat in major cities outside of Africa," Brashares says.

Starting with his initial contact, Brashares has recruited 15
volunteers, expatriates from west Africa to visit illegal markets in
Paris, Brussels, London, New York, Montreal, Toronto and Chicago. A
market in Los Angeles has just been added to the list.

Two volunteers separately recorded the amount of bushmeat for sale at
one sample location in each city. Just over 6000 kilograms of meat
moves through these seven markets each month, Brashares told the
Society for Conservation Biology when it met in San Jose, California,
on 28 June. This probably underestimates the international trade,
itself only a tiny fraction of the wild meat hunted in Africa, most of
which is eaten locally. Primate meat makes up a larger share of what
is sold overseas compared with markets in west and central Africa.

"I have 27 records of chimpanzee and gorilla parts being sold in the
markets," Brashares told New Scientist. "In each case it was not a
complete body, but a hand, leg or, in two cases, a head." Guenon
monkeys and baboon species appear to be a big part of the trade, he
says. Small antelopes called duikers are the most commonly sold
animal, and the rest of the trade is made up of rodents, reptiles and
birds.

Bushmeat is often concealed beneath legal shipments of smoked or dried
fish, but it is difficult to say how much is imported because customs
officials in the US and the UK lump all illegal meat together in their
reports. The sellers don't distinguish between different species, even
in the markets in Africa, and there is a good proportion that
Brashare's volunteers can't identify.

"The bushmeat trade is huge and supports thousands of people in
Africa," says Glyn Davies, director of conservation for the Zoological
Society of London, who pointed out that bushmeat traders are
occasionally arrested in London. He suggests that cane rats and
duikers, for example, which live near farms, could possibly be
harvested sustainably to support local people. "But that is very
different to harvesting large mammals such as great apes and
elephants," he says. "It would be very hard for that to be
sustainable."

Davies says that central governments in Africa need to be made aware
of the millions of dollars being spent on the parallel economy of the
bushmeat trade, and they need to work with the forestry industry to
regulate hunting at the critical forest frontier. People in the know
keep the international markets relatively buoyant, but the demand
isn't driven by need. Prices for bushmeat are higher than for legal
meat.

"It's part of what is clearly a luxury trade," says Brashares. "They
could go and buy a filet mignon in London for what they're paying for
baboon."