Similarly the demise of bushmeat use did not take place, despite regulations and pressure from western civil society, even where alternatives exist. However, just like the bumblebee, most hunted species continue to survive despite scientific predictions announcing their extinction since the late 1990s. Often, a “chronicle of a death foretold” is regularly expressed, based on hunter-prey indicators that ultimately predict that game populations are destined to disappear under current levels of hunting. Research in the past three decades has seen a substantial increase of peer-reviewed papers addressing hunting sustainability (Swamy and Pinedo-Vasquez 2014). Therefore, bushmeat hunting has been compared with domestic meat a symbol of anachronism, backwardness, and inefficiency, just as slash-and-burn agriculture is perceived in comparison with permanent modern agriculture (Mertz 2009). 2013).īushmeat has been in the spotlight because of the generally agreed-upon assumption that hunting in tropical forest regions is unsustainable and that overhunting leads to “empty forests” (Redford 1992). 2005), it is of particular cultural importance for indigenous people as well as a key element along with fish in protein diversification (Sirén et al. Although bushmeat consumption appears less important in South America (Rushton et al. Bushmeat is a crucial source of food and income in Central Africa, where the population is also among the poorest in the world, with a mean annual income of US$583 for 104 million people (UNESCO 2006). (2002) suggest that more than 5 million tons of meat feed millions in the Amazon (0.15 million tons) and the Congo Basin (4.9 million tons) forests annually. Using data from the end of the 1990s, Fa and Peres (2001) and Fa et al. 2008), is a reality in many tropical forest areas. Key words: bushmeat hunting resilience analysis social-ecological systems sustainability tropical areas INTRODUCTIONīushmeat consumption, defined as the use of any nondomesticated terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians harvested for food (Nasi et al. As such, the resilience analysis provides an unprecedented opportunity for the sustainable use of bushmeat and allows the identification of strategies to strengthen resilience when the system is found to be close to a given threshold, instead of reinforcing fortress conservation. The main implication of using the resilience theory in the context of bushmeat hunting is the shift from the need to assess stocks with imprecise measures to the incorporation of the uncertainty and stochasticity inherent to complex systems in participatory and adaptive management processes.
Instead, the analysis of resilience aims at understanding the complex and dynamic relationships between the hunting ground, its resources, the stakeholders, and the different exogenous drivers of change that affect the components of the system at different scales. We suggest that bushmeat hunting systems in tropical areas should be regarded as social-ecological systems in which the impacts of hunting on prey populations are not the only focus. These traditional biological sustainability indices have proved inadequate for measuring the impact of bushmeat hunting because sustainability is treated as a static, binary (yes or no) question, thus ignoring stochastic processes, the inherent variability of natural systems, and the complexity of hunting systems. Traditional methods used to assess the sustainability of bushmeat hunting include demographic models of population growth, one-off biological indicators, population trend methods, harvest-based indicators, and comparisons of demographic parameters between sites. We review the current limits of traditional methods used to investigate sustainability of bushmeat hunting, discuss the need to incorporate the characteristics of complex systems into sustainability assessments, and suggest how resilience theories could assist in understanding bushmeat sustainability and more effective conservation of wildlife in tropical areas.
Despite the fact that sustainability of bushmeat hunting in tropical areas is of major concern for conservation and development practitioners, we still know very little about how to measure sustainability and how to put in place sustainable bushmeat hunting systems.