![In Africa, wildlife raises the risk of deadly diseases. It doesn’t have to In Africa, wildlife raises the risk of deadly diseases. It doesn’t have to](https://morningtopnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/161003141332-ebola-hosts-super-tease-768x432.jpg)
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In the dense tropical forest near Wamba in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Makaite has watched as outsiders strip his traditional lands of wildlife to supply a long-distance market for bushmeat that sees it transported 250 miles by road to Kisangani, and at times, a further 950 miles downriver to the capital Kinshasa.
For Makaite and his ancestors, wildlife has for millennia provided an essential source of food and, at times of need, cash. Hunting and eating wildlife are also the foundation of the Efe Indigenous Peoples cultural identity. Today, their food security and way of life are being threatened by unsustainable trade in wildlife for consumption by people living in urban centers far from Makaite’s traditional forest lands.
We cannot know with certainty what public health and economic havoc Covid-19 will ultimately cause in our countries, but we fear the worst.
What we do know is that healthy food and healthy families are an integral part of what makes us Congolese and Gabonese. Eating a traditional meal with our families and friends is important and, in many ways, defines us. But for urban families like ours, eating wildlife is not essential to our diets. It may have social and cultural value, but it is definitely not a food-security issue, as it is for rural families.
To offer guidance to government decision makers and official overseas assistance providers, we as leaders of the Wildlife Conservation Society Central Africa Program have identified key, multi-sectoral steps needed to decrease the risk of future wildlife disease spillovers to humans and to prevent their spread through secondary transmission from person to person.
We must formally recognize and secure the traditional territorial rights of forest dependent IPLCs. We must prevent others from poaching wildlife within the lands of IPLCs, jeopardizing their food security and food sovereignty.
These kinds of efforts are essential components of early zoonotic (animal-to-human) disease outbreak detection and reporting and do a great deal to protect the health of indigenous hunters and rural families. They can also be scaled up in other places besides Central Africa. Important work in this regard has already begun in Asia, but rolling out these kinds of programs in Latin America deserves some urgent focus.
In Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo, we see that urban families are keen to retain the healthy food and healthy family customs that makes us all Central African. But we can still do so without buying and eating bushmeat. Expanding this new custom of avoiding bushmeat across all major cities in Central Africa will have hugely positive impacts on public health, rural families’ food security, and biodiversity.
For families living in growing provincial towns located close to sources of wildlife where the availability of bushmeat remains a food security issue, we need to vastly increase investment in peri-urban, sustainable production of poultry and farmed fish.
Ebola and Covid-19 have taught us that we cannot continue with “business as usual.” We must change our eating habits and scale down the trade in bushmeat as much as we can. To do that, we need support from the global community to protect the health of all people in Central Africa now and in the future.
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