ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-CAMEROON: Cameroon’s Animals are Fair Game for Illegal Hunters

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Tansa Musa

YAOUNDE, May 30 1998 (IPS) - Restaurant owners and their agents stop by the hundreds each morning at Yaounde’s Elig-Edzoa market, not for the vegetables which were its only produce just about five years ago, but for the game meat that has made it famous here.

The visitor is stunned by the quantity and variety of “bush meat” on display, whether whole or in pieces, smoked, semi-smoked or fresh. Monkey or buffalo, hare, deer or antelope, porcupine or tortoise, viper or wildcat, just about any type of wild animal that exists in Cameroon can be found there.

All the animals, according to Maman Jeannette — one of the popular retailers at the Elig-Edzoa market — are captured in the forests of the Centre, South and East provinces as well as from the savannas of the North that are very rich in game.

A question comes to mind: how are the hunters able to kill game hundreds of kilometres away and transport it to town in a country with a supposedly rigorous anti-poaching law and with game guards posted in various areas?

“It is a complicated process,” explains Manuel Yab, a former middleman who used to liaise between hunters in the wild and wholesalers and retalers in town. Yab, who has now switched to other business, invited IPS one morning to watch an operation that is part of the game-meat trade chain:

It is about 6.30 a.m. The scene is a point three kilometres from the Yaounde train station. The overnight train from the North approaches. It slows down and, as it does so, tightly wrapped jute bags hurled through the windows of the coaches land in the surrounding bushes.

Some of the bags — each of them contains game meat — are picked up by men who run out of the bushes as soon as the train passes. In other cases, the owners get off the train when it stops at the station and then rush back to collect their booty.

In the past five years, illegal hunting has reached unprecedented proportions in this Central African country. Figures are hard to come by but the evidence is there in the abundance and variety of game meat at the Elig-Edzoa market, and the many others like it in Cameroon.

What shocks environmentalists is the impunity enjoyed by all the actors in the illegal trad from the hunter in the bush through the middleman, to the vendor in town.

The Forestry and Wildlife Law prescribes stiff penalties, including long prison sentences, for the illegal killing of wild animals, but this has had little effect, as the Director of Wildlife in the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MINEF), Djoh a Ndiang, admits.

“Our government has a good wildlife conservation policy but we lack the means to implement this policy,” says Djoh a Niang, who explains that the illegal hunters are generally armed with sophisticated weapons and prepared to take risks because of the profits they make from the trade.

On the other hand, forestry and game guards are posted without any firearms to far-flung areas, where they lack means of transport and communication. Moreover, they are poorly paid so they easily end up accepting bribes from poachers.

The most difficult aspect of the illegal trade to deal with is trafficking in ivory, crocodile, panther or leopard skins, ostrich feathers, and parrots and other rare species. Within this high- profit range are to be found some highly placed persons in the ruling class, commonly referred to here as ‘the untouchables’.

A well known story is that of a village chief in Mesok, a small village tucked away in the equatorial forest of south-eastern Cameroon who, thinking he was protected by the law, organised his villagers and got them to seize game from poachers. The booty was publicly auctioned and the proceeds paid into the public treasury as prescribed by the law.

But one week later the chief received a summons to appear in court, where he was fined 65,000 CFA francs (about 130 U.S. dollars). The poacher had simply reported the seizure to his boss in Yaounde who wasted no time in taking legal action.

According to U.S. Ambassador to Cameroon Charles Twining, fighting illegal hunting requires joint efforts worldwide between governments and non-governmental organizations operating in the area of wildlife.

“Any country that has national parks has problems of poaching. And several years ago we realized that this was a problem in Cameroon,” he said here while handing over anti-poaching material to the government for the Benue Park in northern Cameroon.

“I have been there and know a lot of poaching goes on in the Benue National Park just like elsewhere in the country,” he added. “And we like to feel that the protection of the fauna is not just something that affects Cameroon. It affects the heritage of mankind and therefore it is important that we all – whether i is France, the U.S., W.W.F or W.C.A – try to contribute to eliminate or at least get the problem under control.”

A welcome gesture, environmentalists here said, referring to the 50,000-U.S. dollar donation, which included an all-road vehicle, five motorcycles, six rough-terrain bicycles, 10 VHF portable radios, 10 binoculars and 10 back-country tents.

They hoped, though, that the material would not end up in private hands as other state property in Cameroon has.