
Agriculture
The Business of Crime: Poaching in the DRC
Image credit: Shutterstock / Roger de la Harpe
The Congo boasts the world’s second-largest rainforest, the self-same ‘lungs’ referred to above.
According to the 2021 State of the Forests report from the Central Africa Forest Observatory (OFAC), each year these forests sequester around 40 giga-tons of carbon—approximately humanity’s total annual carbon emissions.
All of this is enabled by plant cover that accounts for 70% of the continent’s total across the whole Congo Basin.
Yet deforestation arising from slash-and-burn agricultural practices and illegal logging prompted the above report to declare that 27% of these forests would disappear by 2050 without remedial steps.
Enter Homo Sapiens…
The Congo Basin’s oxygen-generating splendor, spanning 220 million hectares, is home to 11,000 tropical plant species—30% of which are unique to the country.
To this may be added over 1,200 bird, 700 fish, 450 mammal, and roughly 280 reptile species.
But with such variety comes an inevitable and undesirable human activity: poaching.
A nasty reality, this damaging practice is borne out of acute local poverty and opportunistic manipulation that feeds an illicit international trade in exotic pets and objects.
Mirroring terrorist and criminal organizations the world over, this illegal activity has served to fund well over 100 armed groups at the epicenter of the region’s poaching activity.
At risk is an elephant species, the African forest elephant, the world’s second-largest land mammal. The creature faces poaching for ivory, as well as bushmeat.
In a bid to inculcate the systematic prosecution of poachers, the African Wildlife Foundation’s (AWF) anti-poaching strategy has sought to build law enforcement capacity. The scheme is backed by the US Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
Another rare species in jeopardy is the gorilla—both Eastern and Western Gorillas are native to the Congo Basin and currently number in the low thousands.
Hunted for bushmeat, too, civil conflict and the influx of weaponry only served to compound the violence suffered by these vulnerable inhabitants.
Another great ape species, the bonobo, faces a massive population decline of 50% by 2078 from illegal bushmeat hunting and…
…habitat degradation and human contact
Aside from actual hunting for meat and skin, too, logging continues to endanger other rare species like the okapis, the sole family member of the more familiar giraffe, and found only in the Congo Basin.
Thus, it must be stressed that risk also arises from vanishing habitat, lost to agriculture to meet demand for commodities such as palm oil.
For example, a depressing 73.8% of the Western lowland gorilla’s habitat may ultimately be lost to palm plantations.
Add to that the inevitable impact of human settlement encroaching on the wild.
Our close cousin, the chimpanzee—sharing close to 100% of our own DNA—suffers the ecological demise of the Congo Basin. Both hunted and trapped for live traffic, this animal also faces the risk of human-borne diseases that also affect it, such as the Ebola virus.
While it’s tempting to repeat the cliched adage, ‘it’s the economy, stupid,’ the problem goes deeper as the end-consumer of poached animals resides abroad and is willing to pay well for exotica, whether destined for table or private menagerie.
It seems, then, that without explicit assistance from local governments, there is a grim possibility of species extinction.
Follow our coverage of the Democratic Republic of Congo for updates on authorities’ efforts to combat this cruel trade.
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