Bushmeat Alternatives for Rural Africans

by Andrew Tobiason, BCTF

The bushmeat crisis in West and Central Africa will continue as long as there are individuals who rely on wildlife for protein or income. No amount of enforcement or awareness will curb this trade in the absence of realistic alternatives. However, wildlife conservation efforts have traditionally focused on creating and strengthening protected areas, and agricultural development efforts have worked to ensure reliable harvests of staple grains and tubers. This is changing, and many conservation and development groups are now addressing the issue of bushmeat alternatives.

The following paragraphs identify some of the bushmeat alternatives being promoted or considered for sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on innovative economic approaches and protein substitutes. Note that different BCTF members support different approaches to providing bushmeat alternatives, and BCTF itself does not endorse any one approach. For more information on specific projects, visit the hyperlinks throughout this article or see the references at the end.

ECONOMIC APPROACHES

Certain projects borrow as much from the business sector as conservation or development, and are explicitly designed to provide an economic incentive to protect wildlife. Examples include the following:

Community-based natural resource management
In East and Southern Africa, many communities forgo hunting of large animals and manage it for consumptive or non-consumptive tourism. Income from photographic or hunting safaris is split among communities, providing direct payments, small development projects, and an appreciation of wildlife as a valuable resource. Furthermore, project management involves individual paid positions as scouts, anti-poaching officers, guides and biologists. Examples include the Amboseli Community Wildlife Tourism Project (Kenya), the ADMADE program (Zambia), and the Cullman and Hurt Community Wildlife Project (Tanzania).

Conservation Payments
Widely used in developing countries to increase conservation on private land, this system can involve paying communities or individuals to not use an area of wildlife habitat (for farming or other conversion), to not hunt wildlife, or a combination of the two. Sometimes called ‘wildlife leases,’ these can be good short-term measures, during which time other activities should take place which reduce negative impacts (eg., create protected areas, train individuals for alternate means of livelihood, etc.). The primary downside is that payments can be very expensive, and still require compliance monitoring.
A variation of the conservation payment is the ‘conservation concession’, where a government is paid to withhold rather than log a forest concession for the standard period allowed to logging companies, about 20-40 years.

Conservation-oriented business models
Many businesses donate a portion of their revenues to charity, but few are created for the purpose of giving, and perhaps only one performs the work of economic development and wildlife conservation themselves: Wildlife Works.

In order to make better use of an 80,000 acre failing cattle range between Tsavo East and Tsavo West, Kenya’s largest national parks, Wildlife Works offered local people an alternative to their subsistence living. In exchange for removing squatters and snares from the area, Wildlife Works built an EcoFactory in the community for producing designer t-shirts, which are then sold in the U.S. and Europe. Sales finance development projects and 56 full-time jobs (with health insurance) in the community.
The 80,000 acre ranch is now the Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary, and has quickly recovered to provide a key migration corridor for endangered elephants, cheetahs, wild dogs, zebras and 43 other large mammal species. Wildlife Works is applying their business model to other conservation initiatives in Africa, Europe and North America.

While Wildlife Works has helped rural Africans to supply a Western commodity (t-shirts), other groups connect Western consumers to traditional handicrafts. By opening the doors to the global market and advising artisans on product design, conservation organizations can support a sustainable, skills-based income alternative without major investments of capital or infrastructure. Several BCTF Supporting Members are leaders in this form of consumer conservation, purchasing handmade items at fair prices and marketing them to patrons of their gift shops or online stores.

PROTEIN SUBSTITUTES

‘Protein projects’ exist to provide (1) a nutritional supplement or (2) an alternative to hunted wildlife. Vegetable protein alternatives are not specifically included here, but many projects do promote vegetable gardens, crop diversification and crop rotation, which provide nutritionally adequate protein (beans, nuts, grains) and reduce pressure from shifting agriculture. Ocean fishing is also not discussed, although it provides a substantial protein and economic resource for coastal people (increasingly threatened by European commercial fishing fleets). Examples of projects which promote the development of animal protein alternatives include:

Domestic species – The Heifer Project
The Heifer Project provides rural families with animals to raise for meat (rabbits, chickens, cane rats, snails) or animal products (cows, goats, chickens, bees). Some young are passed on to other families, spreading the wealth. Heifer helps form farmer cooperatives to supply volume orders (e.g., restaurants) and provides training in animal husbandry, meal preparation and marketing. Disease management is critical to raising domestic animals in a forest or semi-forest environment.

Wild Species – Micro-livestock projects
Rather than change the type of animals eaten, some projects are working to change the way traditional bushmeat species are ‘produced.’ For these projects, eating wildlife is not a problem but unsustainable hunting is. The solution? Wildlife farming.

Candidate species for farming must breed quickly and be culturally acceptable. Certain rodents, artiodactyls, snails and birds have been raised, but only cane rats and giant African snails have proven productive species. Although wild species are adapted to local diseases, and consumers may have taste preferences for some of them, investing in a ‘micro-livestock’ ranch costs more money than setting snares; part of the appeal of bushmeat hunting is that there is virtually no sunk cost. To address this issue, animals and training are provided at no cost to participants.

Examples of Micro-livestock:

• cane rat (Thryonomys swinderianus)

• brush-tailed porcupine (Atherurus africanus)

• giant rat (Cricetomis emini)

• red river hog (Potamochoerus porcus)

• several types of duiker (Cephalophus spp.)

• giant African snails (Archachatina marginata)

• francolins [related to grouse] (Francolinus squamatus)

Examples of Projects:

• Projet Promotion de l’Elevage d’Aulacodes (Cane Rat Raising Promotion Project) in Benin [PPEA]

• Développement d'Alternatives au Braconnage en Afrique Centrale (Development of Poaching Alternatives in Central Africa) operating in Gabon, Cameroon and Republic of Congo [DABAC]

Aquaculture
Fish farms range in scale from one or a few small ponds to large-scale industrial operations requiring offsite inputs, or integrated with livestock and plant waste operations. Over $500 million has been invested in aquaculture in sub-Saharan Africa since the the 1970’s, but a recent review of fifty-four projects found the majority to be unsuccessful with respect to performance and sustainability. Most of West and Central Africa is ecologically suited to small scale or industrial aquaculture, however, and given sufficient resources for start-up and maintenance, fish farms could be a viable option.

PROJECTS WITH ‘ALTERNATIVES’ COMPONENTS

Besides the projects dedicated to a specific economic model or protein substitute, many more efforts involve a variety of solutions for making rural livelihoods more sustainable with respect to the environment, especially for communities in and around protected areas. These projects promote activities such as bee-keeping, livestock breeding, sustainable forestry and tree nurseries (for fruit, food, fire wood and palm oil), sustainable farming (for cash and subsistence crops), environmental education, family planning, clean water, low-fuel stoves, health care and micro-credit loans – all in an effort to keep pressure off the forest and wildlife. Ecotourism is sometimes a component, if conditions are right (roads and other infrastructure in place). If hunting is allowed, typically it is managed through licensing procedures, harvest quotas, monitoring of animal off-takes, and enforcement. Examples of projects promoting these activities exist for community management areas (eg., Mt. Cameroon Project, and TACARE in Tanzania), protected areas (eg., Dzanga-Sangha Project, CAR and applied to Congo and Cameroon), and extractive industry concessions (eg., SODEPAL project to employ ex-miners in Lékédi Park, Gabon, and PROGEPP project to manage wildlife in logging concessions around Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, Republic of Congo).

REFERENCES
Amboseli Community Tourism: http://www.amboseli.org 
Cullman & Hurt: http://www.cullmanandhurt.org
Wildlife Works: http://www.wildlifeworks.com 
DABAC: http://dabac.cirad.fr

All other projects:

Archer, B., J. Beck, K. Douthwaite, & D. Ruppert. 2003. Playing in Counterpoint: Bushmeat Users and the Possibility of Alternatives. 50 pages. IN Uncertain Future: the Bushmeat Crisis in Africa. www.bushmeat.org/ps.htm