Starving Refugees Eat Endangered Chimps

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 23rd. (Toronto Times) –Hungry refugees in Tanzania are eating chimpanzees and other endangered species in order to supplement their meagre diet, says an international conservation group. Refugees living near national parks are also illegally hunting buffalo, topi, eland, elephant and waterbuck, the wildlife-trade monitoring group Traffic said yesterday.

In neighbouring Kenya, aid and conservation groups say refugee camps housing thousands of people who fled violence after the disputed Dec. 27 election are damaging the environment, as displaced people chopped down trees for firewood. Camps such as the Show Ground site in Eldoret – currently hosting 11,200 people – could cause "significant environmental damage," Jemini Pandya, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration told reporters in Geneva. "IOM will try and protect the areas around camps in Rift Valley Province through the rebedding of saplings and plants in other areas until the crisis is over," she said.

George Jambiya, lead author of the Traffic report on Tanzania, said the refugees' vegetarian food aid rations were partly to blame for the poaching problem. "The scale of wild meat consumption in East African refugee camps has helped conceal the failure of the international community to meet basic refugee needs," he added. Traffic's report was based on studies carried out in 2005 and 2006. But Christiane Berthiaume of the UN's World Food Program, which feeds 215,00 refugees in Tanzania, said meat spoils quickly and canned meat is much more expensive. Substituting canned meat for cheaper beans as a protein supply would add $46 million to the estimated $60 million cost of feeding Tanzania's refugees in 2007 and 2008, she said. Traffic said Tanzania's illegal bush meat trade has also eaten into government revenues from licensed sport hunting and game viewing.

According to the UN refugee agency, Tanzania hosted 11 camps in January 2007, housing 287,061 refugees, down from 350,590 in 2005. Most of the refugees fled conflict in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo as far back as the 1960s, and Rwanda in the 1990s.
by George Obulutsa (Reuters)
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