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African Primate Conservation
From: Columbia University
| By:
John F. Oates |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
African primates face a host of threats, nearly all of them imposed by increasing pressures from neighboring humans. 
As Africa's human population swells and its economies falter, forests fall victim to subsistence farming, logging and oil extraction. In addition to lost habitats, primates face a burgeoning bushmeat trade, with hunters entering the remaining forests in search of wild game for African markets. Through his advocacy of strict conservationism, John F. Oates, professor of anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, seeks to mitigate these threats to African primates. |
 retty much everywhere on the planet, when we talk about conservation we're talking about things that people do. More people means more problems. So what is special about Africa? The African population is growing faster than the rest of the world. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reports that the highest areas of population density in Africa have more than 100 people per square kilometer. While we are used to thinking of Rwanda as having a tremendously high population density, West African countries such as Nigeria and Ghana also have very high population densities, as does the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. The Central African rain forest region remains relatively sparsely inhabited. Keep this population pattern in mind when thinking about the fact that many of the most threatened primates in Africa today live in parts of West and East Africa. |
The World Resources Institute (WRI) reports an annual birthrate of 2.8 percent for Africa--almost double that of the continent with the next highest rate, South America. This rate reaches 2.9 percent if you look only at sub-Saharan Africa. African birthrates have declined slightly in the last few years, and AIDS is likely to further reduce the population growth. However, African rates of population growth are likely to remain higher than elsewhere in the world--with a pretty frightening environmental impact. |
Faltering economics
In recent years, high population growth rates have tended to overwhelm economic growth and agricultural productivity gains in many African countries. As a result, sub-Saharan Africa remains easily the poorest part of the world, with the lowest levels of human development. The UNDP reports a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of less than $1,000 per year, low life expectancy and low female literacy rates as common for sub-Saharan African countries. In 1998, the UNDP listed 44 countries with the lowest levels of human development--32 out of all 44, and 18 out of the bottom 20, are in sub-Saharan Africa. Sierra Leone, a country where I worked for several years, stands at the bottom of the league, with some pretty frightening statistics: a life expectancy of 35 years and very high infant mortality. |
As African populations have grown, economies have flagged and efforts at industrialization have generally stalled. Debates are ongoing about changing the US trade policy to encourage African industrialization--perhaps relieving some of these problems. In the meantime, more land gets cleared as people turn to basic subsistence farming just to stay alive. When even subsistence farming fails for people, some pretty terrible things happen. |
The collapse of Sierra Leone's economy really happened before its civil war started in 1991. It seems to me that many young people--especially young men--were growing up with absolutely no career prospects. They were easily recruited by factional leaders, who sought to acquire more wealth and power by encouraging young people to pick up guns and kill. While the young men have not gotten much richer, some of these leaders have gained access to diamonds and other resources. |
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| Forest cleared for farming near the edge of the Cape Three Points Forest Reserve, Ghana. | |
So poverty often stands at the root of serious unrest and civil warfare, which then produces even further problems for conservation actions. How do you run a conservation program in the middle of a civil war? It's almost impossible. On the other hand, these events can become so destructive to people and economies that sometimes wildlife and forests come back. People leave rural areas, die or are killed. Not that one would want to encourage those things, but from a short-term, conservation point of view, the wildlife may not always be as strongly affected by civil wars as we might imagine. It remains very hard, however, to organize any real conservation action in a systematic way during such situations. |
Increasing subsistence farming
Coming back to the overall pressures produced by population growth and lack of industrialization, you get lots of subsistence farming and clearing of the landscape. Today, farming in densely populated parts of West Africa is the biggest threat to primate habitats. It represents a much bigger cause of erosion in natural forest habitats than commercial logging. In West Africa, the remaining pieces of more or less intact forest have become restricted to a real patchwork across the landscape. |
For instance, today in Ghana almost all the forests outside the government reserves have disappeared, while some areas inside these reserves have been damaged by fire and by logging. Satellite imagery shows the straight boundaries of Ghana's forest reserves, surrounded almost everywhere else by farmland. |
Habitat fragmentation created by these pockets of remaining forest also represents a serious problem for the persistence of primate populations. Now we have not just less overall forest habitat for the primates originally living there but also the splintering of these habitats into smaller, isolated areas. |
Extracting oil
Some of Africa's economic problems have tended to push governments to mine their resources of minerals and timber to pay off foreign debts. Unfortunately, much of the income from logging, mining and oil extraction finds its way not to the national treasury but to the pockets of a few powerful individuals. A classic case was the wealth accumulated by Nigeria's ex-dictator Sani Abacha. A large portion of supposedly national income from oil revenues is believed to have ended up in Abacha's own Swiss bank accounts. |
Multinational oil companies often get a bad name in the conservation world. In fact, the oil business in the Niger Delta has had a relatively small direct impact on primates. Oil-extraction activities tend to occur in quite limited areas, and the delta still has large areas of forest left; oil companies have also supported a number of conservation, development and ecological research projects in the delta. |
Developing the local logging trade
Timber can be thought of as a resource similar to oil and minerals, if you cut it down very quickly, remove it and replace it with something else. This represents a mining, rather than a sustainable harvesting, approach. By improving transport networks and opening communications in remote areas, the activities of the oil industry have increased the impact of logging in the Niger Delta. |
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| Log raft in the Pennington River, Niger Delta, Nigeria. | |
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While the international community has been wringing its hands and complaining about multinational oil companies, some ordinary Nigerians have been getting rich from logging. On one of my last trips to the Niger Delta, I met a series of 2,000 logs being towed in rafts behind a tugboat. This is not an unusual occurrence in the delta. Local men take canoes into the forest when it is flooded, or they dig channels through the muddy ground when it is dry. They cut down trees and float the logs out, accumulating them in creeks. Another man--for example, a tugboat owner from Lagos--comes to the creek and buys the logs, pulling them off to Lagos. In Lagos, he sells the logs to small-scale sawmill operators. |
No multinationals are involved in this logging trade; it is all local enterprise, and it is changing the whole delta forest in a more dramatic way than the oil industry could. Researchers studying red colobus monkeys have found that no forests are left dominated by a tree called hallea. One of the colobus's food sources, hallea used to be one of the most common trees in the delta. Large hallea trees have become very rare, because they are such a favorite of the loggers. |
The Lopi Reserve, in Gabon, is one of the most famous reserves and study sites in tropical Africa. It is a strange mix of savanna and forest, occupying the edge of a little patch of savanna country in the middle of Gabon. Over centuries, humans have contributed to maintaining the savanna, but it seems to be a naturally rather dry area. Gorillas, chimpanzees, forest elephants and mandrills all live here. Recently, researchers were sitting on a rock overlooking the road through the reserve, trying to get regular fixes on the mandrills, which live in hordes of more than 700 individuals. From this vantage point, they saw a string of logging trucks coming through in the afternoon, taking logs to the railroad to be shipped down to the coast. |
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| Logging road in the Krokosua Hills Forest Reserve, Ghana. | |
A lot has been written and argued about tropical-forest commercial logging, which is much more organized and often involves Asian nations. However, the logging in Gabon still remains mostly selective, targeting only certain trees. On its own, selective logging often does not have a huge impact on primate populations. It would lead to extinction probably only in rare cases. Indeed, some colobus monkeys and gorillas seem to increase their numbers as the tree canopy opens--making it easier for them to reach their food, and increasing the productivity of certain plants. |
High-intensity logging--removing well over half of the canopy--certainly does reduce populations of primates such as red colobus monkeys. The greatest danger, of course, comes from going beyond logging, to converting the forest into farmland or plantations. |
Organizing and expanding the bushmeat trade
While selective logging may not present the biggest threat on its own, it does have major indirect effects, rather like the oil industry. Selective logging's most damaging influence stems from opening up the forest to other activities, such as hunting and farming. The hunters are not just trying to feed their families or their local village; they are hunting for an organized commercial market. |
Bushmeat is not a completely new threat. People have been eating primates in the African rain forest for as long as they have had an ability to hunt them--first with bows and arrows and then with guns. Today's crisis stems in particular from the relatively new phenomenon of the bushmeat trade existing on a major, organized scale in Central Africa. Until recently, Central Africa had a relatively low population density and large stretches of relatively intact forest. First commercial logging entered these forests, followed by the bushmeat hunters. |
West Africa has had a much higher human population density and more economic activity for a longer period of time. Here, the bushmeat trade has been in progress for decades, back to the late 1950s. Now this trade is leading to extinctions. Over the past few years, colleagues and I have searched 20 reserves in western Ghana and eastern Ivory Coast for Miss Waldron's red colobus monkey. We have not been able to find any surviving populations. We believe it is extinct, almost certainly because of commercial bushmeat hunting. While forest disturbance and destruction from heavy logging and farming in Ghana have also had an impact, our guess is that hunting has actually driven these animals to extinction. |
However, accurate data on the impact of bushmeat hunting remains hard to come by. John Fa conducted some relatively good market surveys on the island of Bioko, comparing numbers of primate carcasses entering the main market on the island between 1990 and 1996. He found a major decrease in the numbers of all primates in that period. What does this mean? We guess that the hunters are finding few of these monkeys, because the monkeys themselves are fewer in number and living in more inaccessible areas. But we cannot completely dismiss the possibility of other economic factors. |
Larger primates seem to have suffered the greatest decline from bushmeat hunting in Africa; this is true of red colobus monkeys in particular but also of species such as apes, drills and mangabeys. But the pattern is not totally consistent. What other kinds of evidence do we have about the impact of commercial hunting? We have surveys of primate numbers in the field, numbers that are not linked directly to the market. There are also larger numbers of squirrels and rats in the market, which seems to strongly suggest that the demand for bushmeat remains even though there are fewer primates out there for hunters. |
Measuring endangerment
Looking at all those factors together, we can start to identify primates that are particularly threatened. But this again raises a problem. Even if we suspect that threats such as logging and hunting affect primate numbers, how do we represent the threat to a particular population in an objective, easily understood fashion? We're all used to hearing and reading about endangered species, but--as some of you may know--considerable debate remains about how to measure endangerment. |
We grappled with this topic at a workshop of the primate specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in February 2000 in Orlando, Florida. In the 1996 primate action plan, the IUCN adopted some standard criteria such as "critically endangered," "endangered," "vulnerable" and "low risk," based on a variety of quantitative and semi-quantitative measures. The aim of such categorization is to reduce subjectivity in threat assessment--leading to more sensible decisions about which animals really are endangered and helping researchers to determine their resource allocations. |
However, placing primates into different threat categories can be more of an art than a science. We often have to guess at rates of decline and possible population areas. At Orlando, we regarded only one African primate species, Kenya's Tana River red colobus, or Procolobus rufomitratus, as critically endangered. "Critically endangered" is defined as facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future--equivalent to a 50 percent probability of extinction within 10 years or three generations. |
"Endangered" means facing a very high risk of extinction--or a 20 percent probability within 20 years or five generations. The drill, the Diana monkey, the chimpanzees and the gorilla are among 13 African primate species that the Florida workshop placed in the "endangered" category. |
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| Mountain gorilla, Zaire. | |
The great apes present a bit of a problem. Are they really endangered with extinction in the near future? Personally, I rather doubt it. But if you apply the IUCN criteria in terms of a probability of extinction over three generations, then, given that the great apes reproduce so slowly and have such long generations and that the future of Africa remains so uncertain, how can you not say that they have a high probability of extinction in 60 to 75 years? |
Identifying patterns of endangerment
These patterns of endangerment are not random across the continent. They tend to cluster in certain areas because the primates themselves have certain patterns of habitation. Forests in the Gulf of Guinea area in West Africa, for example, contain many species and subspecies with very restricted distribution. These forests also have high human population densities. We find that such areas are "hot spots" for conservation, combining locally restricted distribution plus high threat. |
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| Gorilla gorilla diehli. | |
One of our critically endangered subspecies is the new gorilla subspecies we're recognizing, Gorilla gorilla diehli, which lives on the Nigerian-Cameroon border. My student Kelley McFarland has been studying these apes for the past few years, and only twice has she ever seen her study animals. She purposely did not want to approach the animals too closely or try to habituate them, because the threat of hunting is so great. As far as we can tell, less than 200 remain, scattered across five or six subpopulations. They are still being hunted, really teetering on the brink of extinction. There seems little doubt that Gorilla gorilla diehli should be regarded as critically endangered. |
Conserving African primates
What is the most effective way to counter all the threats facing primates? Two major approaches exist:
- Emphasizing strict protection.
- Integrating conservation with development projects.
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In the last couple of decades, large international conservation agencies sponsoring tropical and African conservation projects have advocated a strategy of integrating economic and agricultural development with conservation activities. They have taken this route based on the argument that a lack of development presents the greatest impediment to conservation in places like tropical Africa. By providing development assistance, they hope to divert people from exploiting forest resources and to compensate them for their loss of access to resources. You can understand some of the logic in this approach. It stems from the issues of poverty and lack of development placing pressures on subsistence farmers and hunters. |
Although logic might suggest that this is the best approach, my observations tell me that most of these projects are conservation failures. When put into practice, such projects face a number of serious problems: they tend to increase human population adjacent to the conservation targets, and they also tend to increase the purchasing power of these people, who buy more guns and shoot more animals. |
Given the nature of the funding for these projects--typically from governmental and international aid agencies--they are usually short-term, lasting for three to five years. The projects inevitably send messages that de-emphasize the importance of protecting wildlife and stress looking after human needs. In Nigeria, most people in the Cross River National Park area thought that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was a development agency. They expected the WWF to build more schools and more plantations. In addition, such projects typically involve highly paid foreign consultants and big international agencies. Everybody starts thinking about money first, rather than about conservation goals. |
Advocating strict protection
I think the best hope for the future of many of these African primates--at least in the short to medium term--lies in rigorously protecting a series of large parks or similar reserves. We should choose these areas based on our understanding of primate diversity patterns and the structure of primate communities. We don't have to protect the whole African rain forest zone, just carefully selected reserves that are large enough to hold on to much of the existing major features of diversity. This goal was central to our first African action plan. |
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| Forest cleared for farming near the edge of the Sapoba Forest Reserve, Nigeria. | |
Counter to what some people argue, we are not depriving vast numbers of people of a livelihood by setting up and strictly protecting national parks in the forest zone of Africa. For example, logging concessions cover almost all of Cameroon, with the exception of the less profitable areas on the borders of the savanna zone, the national parks and other protected areas. Soon there will be relatively few untouched parts of the country left. The same pattern exists in Gabon. When we talk about tropical-forest conservation and protecting national parks, we are actually talking about quite restricted areas. Overall, I think we'll be lucky to hold on to 5 percent of some of these countries, even as national parks. We will really not deprive large numbers of people of their livelihoods, as long as we plan things properly. |
Funding conservation
How are we going to accomplish this, given all these existing threats and pressures? Given their economic problems, many African countries are unable or unwilling to put the necessary money into protecting these parks. The money for protecting these parks will have to come from outside, from richer countries. |
The money already exists. I recently returned from a workshop in Gabon. Around 150 people stayed in a luxury hotel in Libreville--which is one of the most expensive cities in the world--for four days, at an estimated cost of probably $300,000. Yet we find it difficult to convince international conservation organizations to find sums of money like $5,000 to support small-scale protection efforts for endangered populations. While it is easy to get money for scientific gatherings and workshops, funding the actual conservation work--which is not really science and certainly is not a conference--is different. |
So the money is out there. Instead of spending it in big globs in the short term, or sending it to the Swiss bank accounts of national leaders or putting it into the pockets of consultants, a much better approach is to follow the model of trust funds. Try to set up trust funds dedicated to particular parks. The money can come from the existing funding agencies, perhaps supplemented with tourist revenues, and the interest from these funds can then pay for the basic management costs. Trust funds are not a completely strange idea; they have been tried in a few places. Although they sound easier to operate than they actually are, I think they probably represent our best hope for preserving these parks in the future. |
I think that chasing after the huge amount of money available from the so-called donor agencies and the big international development organizations has been a deeply corrupting factor in international conservation. It has really distracted people's attention from the rather dull need to devote modest sums of money over long periods of time to the basic protection of these special animals and places. |
Most of all, we need to change the prevalent attitude that conservation is somehow a business. So many people all over the world at so many levels are involved with conservation as a way to make money or build a career. In my view, we will lose a lot of precious wild things very soon unless we start going back to some older arguments--perhaps old-fashioned, but I think still valid--that protecting and preserving nature for its intrinsic value is worthwhile in itself. We should place our conservation planning ahead of any monetary or personal-advancement considerations. |
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