Temporal evolution of bushmeat traded in High Niger National Park, Guinea,West Africa L UCIE DUONAMOU,ALEX ANDRE KONA T E ,J ILIANG XU and TAT Y A N A HUMLE
Abstract The High Niger National Park is one of the most important protected areas for biodiversity conservation in Guinea. This study examined the temporal evolution of the bushmeat trade in three rural markets in the Park and in the nearest urban centre, Faranah.We collected data inmar- kets during August–November 2017 in three villages around the Mafou core area of the Park and in Faranah, and com- pared these data with equivalent published data from the same rural areas in 2001 and 2011 and from Faranah in 1994, 1995, 1996 and 2011. Across all study periods, mammals predominated in the bushmeat trade. In rural markets we noted a marked increase in the number of carcasses and bio- mass offered for sale from2001 onwards, whereas in Faranah therewere no differences over time other than a peak in 1996. Overall, there was an increase in the sale of smaller sized species (,10 kg), and a marked increase in the sale of species that forage on crops, including the green monkey Chloroce- bus sabaeus and warthog Phacochoerus africanus,inspite of religious taboos against the consumption of primates and Suidae. Green monkeys were not sold in markets during the 1990s but were the dominant species in Faranah in 2011 and 2017. Our findings suggest a marked shift in traded species, associated with crop protection by farmers and economic in- centives to kill and trade crop-foraging species. This study highlights the value of a longitudinal perspective for investi- gating the dynamic relationship between local livelihoods and biodiversity conservation.
Keywords Bushmeat trade, crop-protection, Guinea, High Niger National Park, human–wildlife conflict, hunting, market surveys, primate conservation
Supplementary material for this article is available at
doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319001443
Introduction
rural populations in West Africa, has become an important commercial activity (Bowen-Jones, 2003). Bushmeat hunting is pervasive acrossWest Africa and is one of the main threats to mammal populations in the region (Fa et al., 2002, 2003; Lindsey et al., 2011; Humle & Konate, 2015; Ripple et al., 2016). Unsustainable hunting practices are affecting c. 68% of wildlife species inWest andCentral Africa, and are direct- ly affecting c. 84 mammalian species (Bowen-Jones, 2003). Depletion of wildlife is increasingly affecting people’s well- being and access to sources of protein and revenue, especially in rural areas (Nasi et al., 2011). To date most bushmeat stud- ies have been carried out in forested areas (van Velden et al., 2018); few have focused on savannah-dominated ecosystems inWest Africa, especially within Guinea’s dry forest systems (Lindsey et al., 2013). It is critical to gather knowledge from such landscapes, to better understand the impact of hunting on wildlife and wildlife depletion on ecosystem integrity, as well as on people’s livelihoods andwell-being in less forested and more arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Studies in Africa generally suggest that urban demand is
H LUCIE DUONAMOU (
orcid.org/0000-0002-6912-5923) School of Nature
Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China ALEXANDRE KONATE (
Agronomy and Veterinary of Faranah, Faranah, Guinea JILIANG XU (Corresponding author,
TATYANA HUMLE (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0003-4896-8929) Institute Superior of
orcid.org/0000-0002-2542-6441) School
of Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, 35 Qinghua East Road, Haidian District, China. E-mail
xujiliang@bjfu.edu.cn
orcid.org/0000-0002-1919-631X)
Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology School of Anthropology and Conservation, Marlowe Building, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NR, UK E-mail
t.humle@
kent.ac.uk
Received 2 May 2019. Revision requested 9 September 2019. Accepted 13 December 2019. First published online 18 September 2020.
a major driver of the bushmeat trade (Brashares et al., 2011; Fa et al., 2015). However, other factors such as poverty and human population growth also influence this trade (Lindsey et al., 2011;Pimmetal., 2014; Ripple et al., 2016). Farmers in many regions also practice lethal wildlife control using snares and, increasingly, shotguns, to protect their crops, although it remains unclear to what extent such mitigation strategies fuel the bushmeat trade (Alexander et al., 2015;Humle&Konate, 2015). Such practices often target rodent, primate and Suidae species, which are amongst the most common crop-foraging species in Africa (Brooks et al., 1993;McNamaraet al., 2015; Garriga et al., 2018). In West Africa, primates account for 1–50% of carcasses recorded in bushmeat markets (Davies &Brown, 2008).Wildlife authorities inUganda have declared baboons Papio sp., the vervet monkey Chlorocebus pygery- thrus and red river hog Potamochoerus porcus to be vermin and farmers can therefore hunt these species to reduce dam- ages and losses to their crops (Naughton-Treves et al., 1998). Bushmeat consumption studies in Lalehum near the Gola North Forest Reserve in Sierra Leone showed that the greater cane rat Thryonomys swinderianuswasmore frequently killed and consumed during the so-called hungry season, when rice is growing, whereas duikers were hunted and consumed more during the dry season (Davies & Brown, 2008). Although
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 717–724 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001443
unting, which was once considered a subsistence and traditional activity supplying protein resources for
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