 And so, I was very pleased to be asked to introduce Robert, who's speaking to a very important topic on questions of wildlife, bush meat, and biodiversity in tropical forests and the contributions that wildlife, small animals, fish, and so on, make to forest-based livelihoods. And a whole host of issues arising with respect to the protection of these resources, their importance in the forest ecology and their importance to livelihoods and incomes. So, Robert, with that, I turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everybody. And I'm quite impressed to be sitting on this part of this thing, some sort of dark shape in the background. Why bush meat? You may ask the question, after all, we are the Center for International Forest Research. Why do we work on the question of wildlife and food? Because it has a lot of repercussions in terms of the dynamics of the forest. 70% of the species in tropical forests are disseminated by animals. A large number of the same species are predated by animals. These are the same animals that people hunt for food or for the purpose. So changing the wildlife composition in a given forest stand is changing the dynamic of the forest. It can be changing on the long-term. The carbon stock can be changing the forest or something else. And this has been described in 1982 by Ken Redford as the empty forest syndrome. So you have a forest that is still with a lot of trees. If you look at it by remote sensing, you still see a forest inside. It's empty. There is no animal. And then the forest is more or less doomed to change. How it is going to change is not yet sure, but we have some hints that show that it's going to change the balance in terms of fast growing spaces, slow growing spaces, carbon-rich spaces, carbon, less carbon-rich spaces in terms of trees. So there is a significant ecological impact on the wildlife. There is also a more crucial impact. It's a loss of biodiversity. And that's clearly how the issue of bush meat or anything for wildlife or food has been presented for decades. I mean, that's fundamentally we are extirpating spaces in place like Ghana. Anything that is bigger than five kilos has disappeared. So what you are left with is the rats and equivalents in the forest. So we are seeing a biodiversity crisis. The problem with this biodiversity crisis approach is that it has very little traction with the local people at any level from the villager to the ministers or the presidents. Because fundamentally it is seen as a problem of the North. I mean, these are these people in developed countries that tell us you need to protect, you need to stop hunting, but what's the purpose? The forest has always been there, the food has always been there. And we need that. And I think that's what we are still trying to do in our Bush Meat Research Initiative in C4 is to try to look at various angles, not only the conservation one in terms of this Bush Meat question. And I'm going to illustrate that specifically with the Congo Basin because it's the place I know best and that's the place where the various issues converge quite nicely. Congo Basin, six countries, Cameroon, Gabon, the two Congos, Equatual Guinea, Central African Republic. That's about 100 million people, 70 million are in DRC and the rest is scattered in 25 million in Cameroon and after it's mainly very low population, country Gabon is 1.5 million, Congo 3 million, Equatual Guinea less than 1 million. So a lot of forest, the second largest block of rainforest in the world, the second largest block of dry forest also in the world with the Miyambo. So it's quite an important area and it's also an area where a lot of the people derive between 40 to 60% of their protein from wildlife, fish or Bush Meat. And the size of the Bush Meat issue in the Congo Basin is quite staggering. It's 5 million tons per year of animal extracted for food. 5 million tons, just to give you an idea, it's about 80% of the overall beef production of the European Commission countries. And we do have a problem when you look only at the local level and at the consumption level and addressing that from the conservation perspective. You should stop hunting. Well, fine, let's stop hunting but who is going to produce 5 million tons of beef or equivalent to feed the people in the Congo Basin? People that are already below the World Health Organization minimum in terms of protein intake, so you reduce something that is already below. And as of today, I mean, there is no substitution. We cannot replace these 5 million tons. We cannot simply say people, you should stop hunting or you should stop eating meat. So we should try to manage these resources. And that's something that nobody has really tried to do in the context of forest. People have tried to do that in Savannah where they are do game-wrenching. But in the high forest context, it's very difficult, so it never happened. And it's not that it's not possible, but that was already considered as something, no, we should protect the species. And we show in our research that it is possible to manage some of the species. Is it possible to have a sustainable hunting on the small, fast-reproducing, resilient species? What we call the rat equivalence, but in fact it's anything from 1 kilo to 40 kilo, small antelopes, rats, porcupine and other fast-reproducing species. Pangolin are a bit different, they belong to this category, but they are slower producing, so they should be protected. The interesting part is that this group of species represents already 70% of the catch. Most of the people, they don't go out in the forest to kill a gorilla. They go out in the forest to take some meat, and it's much more easier to handle a small antelope than an injured gorilla or to kill an elephant. You just need to have a few dollars you can invest in a little bit of steel cable, you make a snare and you can catch an animal. If you want to want a big animal, you need a gun and you need a... So it's quite easy to enter the bushmeat value chain, it's a low investment. I return, bring you some cash, a lot to pay for the school of the kids, a lot to buy some cigarettes, some basic product. So it's something that is quite easy and that's part of the livelihood of the local people. And it's very important to understand also that it's a very gendered value chain. Men are hunting, women are selling and cooking the product. And this plays a disproportionate role in the livelihood of women. And then you have also added to that the public health issue, the fact that you have all heard about the Ebola crisis. If you remove the few grams of bushmeat that the people eat in Madagascar, I mean, sort of if you increase the chance of anemia in children by 25% there is a clear link in the Congo basin in the work. We have just finished with the colleague from Imperial College between availability of bushmeat, pressure, rate of stunting and prevalence of Ebola. So there is a clear interlinkage that we need to understand better and then working on it. So how can we work on that? I think that we should really look at the bushmeat as a sort of a socioeconomic problem more than a conservation problem. And we need to address reducing the demand. And we can reduce the demand in town. People in town have less the need to eat bushmeat than in rural village. We can stop the demand in international. There is nobody who needs to eat bushmeat in Paris or Brussels, sorry. We can reduce that. We can improve the sustainability of supply by managing the resource, the faster producing spaces. And at the same time, we need to work on alternative proteins. But we know that the alternative protein solution is not for today. So maybe in 25 years from now. And it's linked to the fact that people are moving from rural area to town. That's it's more and more in an urbanized world and more and more wilderness around. So it is where we are. And it is the sort of the purpose of the work we do in the bushmeat research initiative in C4. And now we have work in the Congo basin, but we have also work in the Amazon countries. And we are starting something in Southeast Asia. And really the purpose is to shift the paradigm from bushmeat being a biodiversity issue, to bushmeat being a livelihood development issue, also a conservation one, that we can address through proper management and proper multiple use management of tropical forest. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. So we'd like to invite colleagues to pose some questions or offer some comments. If I could ask you, when you do ask a question to stand up and give your name. Thanks Robert. I'm Lou Verso. And I just like to ask you, you talked a bit about this, the urban demand. And I'm just wondering, how much can the urban demand actually be a motor for creating value and using that value to create incentives for improved conservation or improved management? You know, if something is valued, and people can earn a living off of it, won't it be more incentive to conserve it and to manage it appropriately and more sustainably rather than cutting off the urban consumption and then having it just be a subsistence product? Again, there are three elements in the answer to your question, Lou. One is the fact that first, urban people are eating 10 times less bushmeat per capita than rural people. So people moving to cities with the same population, you reduce the demand. Second, people in cities can pay more, are willing to pay for bushmeat. When they move into cities, it becomes more like a luxury product instead of a basic product. So this is where it is important to have the issue of the bushmeat sector recognized as something which is formal, that is open and not criminal. As it is now, we cannot do what you suggest because everything is criminal. You are not supposed to hunt. You are not supposed to trade. You can only hunt with the traditional purpose for your own consumption. It is not the case. So before moving to this, I mean, giving a value to the end product in the value chain, we need to have the enabling environment and we need to have the politics understanding that it is important to bring these things out of the criminal world to something that we can manage and keep protecting the species that need to be protected. But yes, that's one of the ideas. Controlling more the demand in town, increasing the price in town so that it becomes a luxury product and at the same time working on the whole value chain, trying to bring it out of the criminality where it stands now. Thanks, Peter Holmgren. You started by saying that you asked the question whether why do we talk about bushmeat when we are dealing with forestry. To me, clearly, this is part of forestry. And at least when I studied forestry, hunting was a big part of the curriculum. So I think there's no doubt that the conservation values and the use values of bushmeat are inside the domain of forestry. But I had two boundary questions that I would like to tease out on. One is, to what extent are we talking about the forest? Do we also have bushmeat outside the forest? Maybe agro-bushmeat or whatever you might call that. Or are we confining this to the forest ecosystem in any way? That's one. And the second is, what about the wider game hunting for food? It's a very large part of the forest use in many, many countries around the world. And are we including all of that in the concept? And if so, because if we do that, and we're talking about a very high proportion of the value of the forest use, I'm curious about your views on those two. And just to conclude, I think it's excellent because this also shows how we enter the nutrition and health issues from forestry. Thank you. First part of your question, I think, yes, it's a forest, but the forest, we have a broad sense, in a sense, a significant amount of the hunting is what we call garden hunting. It's people snaring animals that are raiding their crops. So it's more like the forest landscape. So we are looking at the hunting question in the Congo basin, in the thing that is defined as the Guineo-Kongolian rainforest area, but you have savannah inside. We are also looking at issues on dry land and in savannah. So it's more, what do you do with wildlife at the landscape scale in terms of managing and extracting the resource? So it's not simply located within the forest. And a lot of the most profitable hunting is happening in fallows anyway, more than in the deep forest. About your second question, we haven't really looked at the bigger world because it's a sort of a different story. In most places in developed countries, hunting is seldom happening because it is a food security or nutrition issue. It's first something which can be cultural, something that people like to do. People make money out of it, but assuming that we stop hunting, nobody is going to die of hunger. But that's something that other people are considering, but we limit ourselves to the tropic and for this part on the issue of bushmeat. Our colleagues in Sirada are working on the sport hunting issue, but it's more related to the dry land area. Daniel. Daniel. I learned and believe that the term bushmeat came from the work in Africa. As we learned that you are going also to work in Latin America, Southeast Asia, how do you anticipate the terminology when this term is propagated to many different geographic locations with regard to their belief, their culture, whether it's for lack of flying meat or something. In fact, the term bushmeat comes from the French viande de bros, which really is sort of a literal translation of meat from the bush. And it's widely recognized. We had some sort of an endless discussion with the colleagues in FAO, essentially we use bushmeat or wild meat. We use bushmeat because people recognize its links to the issue of the bushmeat crisis. In terms of what is happening in Latin America, in the Amazon mainly, it's more or less the same than what is happening in the Congo basin, except that in the Amazon people are very likely eating more fish than they are eating meat. So it's really the major protein source is fish, but they do hunt for meat and so when we talk to the people in Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries, they translate literally also bushmeat into the equivalent to in Spanish or Portuguese. So it's not an issue in terms of that. And by bushmeat we include anything that is more than 500 grams, so we have a tendency to stay away from the grubs and the insects, although they play an important role, but it's sort of a different dynamic, different issues. In Southeast Asia it's a different problem. Southeast Asia, most of the trade in wildlife is for medicinal purpose. There are some link to people eating, but it's always with some sort of background, or you are eating a turtle soup because it's good for your health, or you are eating the Pangolin, but in fact you are mainly interested in the Pangolin scales. So we have a study that looks at the wildlife market in the mainland Asia, continental Southeast Asia, and it's really about the medicinal trade, that's the main issue. And that makes it totally different from the two other, the Congo Basin and Amazon Basin. Dan? Dan Kuni. Robert, two questions. What's the global trend in terms of whether bushmeat hunting is legal, illegal, banned or not? And secondly, are there examples of where there's been sort of empty forest syndrome and then communities through the legalization and regulation of bushmeat hunting where the biodiversity has come back to sustainable levels? The trends, I mean I'm not sure that there is a sort of a global common trend, but the overall situation you have in many countries is that the regulatory framework is totally in adapted to the reality. And that search is not implemented. You have forestry or wildlife laws and regulation in most of the countries in the Congo Basin. They cannot be implemented. They have been developed by people coming from the north and then they give you hunting season where there is no meaning of any hunting season in this country, or they say that you can only hunt with a cable that is made with grass or something like that. So it's not implementable, but as a result, everything is criminal. You can have a license in Cameroon, but buying a license to trade bushmeat costs you $800, which is beyond anybody. And in the Amazon Basin, I guess Emigre will be better to answer, but the situation differs for each country and even within a country like Brazil, it differs by state. So there is no global trend. Some people consider bushmeat in their statistics, some don't, some consider that you can hunt, but you cannot trade, some consider that you can only hunt for your own consumption. So it's a bit of a mess. Overall, the legislative framework is totally in adapted to managing the resource. The second question, I'm not sure. From the top of my mind, I can't tell you if there is a place that was completely empty of animal that we left alone, the animal came back. We have an evidence that when you disturb, like after logging operation, the animal go away. A few years later, they come back in bigger numbers because they like the differentiated vegetation. You have some open area with grass, you have some closed area. But in terms of what is happening with the empty forest syndrome is generally linked to a high level of population and pressure and the population stays there. What is mostly happening is that it's not the animal that comes back, it's the forest that disappears to produce something else. Kiran Nasher, thanks. Thanks, Rubir. You were talking at the beginning part of your talk about how there's management and ranching of wild animals in Savannah, but not so much in forests. I was wondering if you knew anything or any updates about what was going on with Dagmar Werner's project on iguana conservation in Central America, where she was trying a model of ranching iguanas in semi-captivity, so the eggs would be on a farm. Once they got to a certain size, they would be released in the forest or on the edge of the forest. Do you know of any other studies that would be implementable or that would be interesting to look at for bushmeat? There have been a few attempts at breeding small rodents, especially what they call the brusch tail porcupine, which is one of the most hunted species. The problem is that it doesn't make economic sense in many cases. The most blatant example was that I was in a conference in Brussels about bushmeat, food security in the DRC, and we had this session on wildlife. And you had a very dignified Belgian professor that would say, oh, presenting a breeding of holacod, this brusch tail porcupine, in the area of Kisangani. And they say, yeah, you should do that. It's how you can do it. You have to give this type of food to the animal, and then we grow by so many grams per day. And then something like 10 minutes later, we had a Congolese PhD student who just finished his PhD on the damage to crops by wildlife. And his conclusion was that, oh, every year, the farmer in Kisangani, they lost $7 million equivalent of maize and rice because of the brusch tail porcupine. So you can see that when you go to the people and you say, you should breed this animal that is just destroying their culture, the message doesn't come very well. I mean, they better buy a gun and shoot the things. So it could work in the context like Kinshasa, where you have a 10 million person capital city that is surrounded by no forest, no thing is left. So people would make sense economically in Kinshasa to breed some animals and sell to the people. But in fact, it's much more efficient to work with the animals we know, like pigs, chickens than to breed these rodents. So when it makes economic sense, it's much more easier to use the domestic animal we know. And in many cases, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Totally different situation in the game-wrenching business in the open savanna. Yeah, no. I think you more or less responded with the previous question. I was wondering because you mentioned the traditional opposition between conservation promoted by the north and extraction by the south. But I mean, the whole point of sustainability is to have a reconciled both issues. So I was wondering whether you could observe some local attempts with collective action for regulation in order to make it more sustainable because people are, I guess, starting to face the consequences of overproduction. There are some things in Latin America because the civil society is much more advanced than in the Congo basin. For the case of the Congo basin, that's the problem we are facing. The north see it as a conservation problem. The people in the Congo basin, they don't see it as a problem at all. So for them, there is nothing to address. If you go and you are invited to it by some of the ministers in charge of the environment, they will serve you bushmeat. For them, there is no social stigma associated. There is no problem associated with bushmeat. Because they only see that as presented as a conservation problem. When you start to talk to them and you tell them, okay, you know that the bushmeat informal sector is the size of the whole agricultural sector of your country, then it starts to be. Then you tell them, you know how many millions of CFA francs you could get back into the state coffin simply by managing the resource instead of making it criminal and only breeding corruption. But we are not, that's part of the thing that we are doing in the Congo basin is trying to raise the issue so that people start discussing and realize that there is a problem. Then you can talk about collective action to address the issue. But as of today, this didn't work. Aaron, this is the last question. Aaron Russell, thank you for your presentation. I would agree that the problem to me seems to be two different problems. One is with regard to conservation of biodiversity in rural areas in terms of rural consumption patterns. And the other one is very different with regards to urban consumption. But urban consumers, they would still prefer to have bushmeat if they had the choice. And the alternative that they're going to is to poultry and beef. And from all of our research, that typically results in negative consequences for the global climate and water consumption and all of that. Is that, maybe that is a northern kind of value that's particular, that only some northerners are considering. But is that something that is worth pursuing as a rationale for increasing the amount of sustainably raised bushmeat or fish, I would like to say, for urban consumption? And linking to that, I mean, like you said, fish is the main source of protein consumed in a lot of the Congo basin. And there's, should we be focusing, should we be focusing on, obviously that's the World Fish Center's work. But there's a lot of flooded forest that produces all that fish. And it has a direct impact also on wildlife consumption. So should we be looking at fish? And also like the Mekong, we can't just say, oh, and we're talking about grubs as if it's not a significant thing. That is grubs and crustaceans and snails and frogs are one of the primary sources of protein in some of the Mekong. Should we be discussing, should we kind of, obviously, WWF and all these other organizations, they focus on habitats for large charismatic species. But like you say, the main thing that people are after are the caterpillars and the fish. And should we be focusing more on that? The first part of your question about the urban demand, it's, I was thinking like you a few years ago, it's a bit more complicated. I mean, you have in some urban cities where Bushmeat is a luxury product, typically Libreville in Gabon, where they will buy a leg of a dricker for Christmas. But most of the time, they will eat chicken or fish. And what we see in the area of the Trifontura area, in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, it's in fact that there is a nutrition transition where people are not buying Bushmeat anymore, only a few people. What they buy is frozen chicken from Brazil, because it's cheaper. And in Kisangani, people buy Bushmeat because it's cheaper. And when there is Caterpillar, Caterpillar are cheaper than Bushmeat, they buy Caterpillar. So there is a test element, but the test element is vanishes in front of the economic element. If you provide them with something that is cheaper, a source of protein, they will buy this one. And from time to time, they will have a luxury to buy something like that. So that's something. About the fish, I fully agree with you, but nobody is working on the fish. I've asked the colleagues of the World Fish Center, does anybody work on the freshwater fish? I know. So yes, that's a big black box, because a lot of the conservation agency, they will tell you, oh, you should stop and think and eat fish. My feeling and the anecdotal evidence is that fish stocks are probably more depleted than even the Bushmeat terrestrial animal stocks. So we cannot just stop and move to fish. I mean, fish are already harvested, but we know very little about that. You're in Makoku in Gabon, you have a sort of a 900 meter wide river that is flowing across the city. And you go, you buy the fish. The fish is coming from 500 kilometers. They give you an idea of the state of the river. So yes, yes, we should do that. And something that we consider, but of course, you're always limited by the human or in financial resources you have. And the fact that there is very, very little on fish. The USAN just published an atlas of the conservation and endangered aquatic wildlife in the Congo basin. But that's the first sort of answer. And there is nothing about the management. If you take the FAO statistics, they will tell you that people in DRC eat five kilo of fish per year, which is ridiculous. Well, thank you, Robert. Sorry. Peter, your last question. Sorry to ask again, Peter. I want to relate this work to the CDIR. Two questions. One is how does this work in terms of food and nutrition sit within the CDIR's mission for food and nutrition security? What's the perception? Do we have to fight for this space, et cetera? And secondly, given that we are moving towards a new phase of CRPs and flagships, et cetera, et cetera, is there space for a flagship on wild food for nutrition and health or something like that? Well, the first part of the question is very easy. It sits here and with ME over there. So it's definitely not in F4NH. They don't work at all on these topics. We discuss with them. They recognize that there is an interest. But this is not their concern. On the second question, yes, we are discussing, and especially with colleagues in Inveria Center, on this issue of what is badly called nutrition sensitive landscape, which is, in fact, it's something that considers also all the elements brought by wild food in the livelihood, food security and nutrition and local people, and not simply the domestic forming elements. So I guess it's definitely something that could be a flagship and that could be of great importance. All the data we have showed that anything between 10% to 60% of the protein intake comes from wild meat between 15% and 100% of the food security is mainly achieved by wild products. That is a significant element of the livelihood is also linked to selling this product to get cash to buy food. And all these elements are totally ignored in the current context, where in fact, you are farmer doing farming and eating and selling domestic animals. Well, no, there are something else, and this is something that we can work with. Robert, thank you very much for the very interesting presentation. Thanks, everyone, for the great discussion. Thank you.