Biochar Fund's concept to phase out bushmeat to be tried in Gabon

Kinshasa, DRCongo, July 11, 2010 - The Biochar Fund has received strong expressions of interest for its innovative concept aimed at phasing out the bushmeat trade in Central Africa. After a consultation with major environmental and international development organisations, it decides to take the idea forward, and will start testing it in 10 villages in northern Gabon.

Each year, around 1.5 million tons of bushmeat is consumed in Central Africa. This can be visualised as a gigantic troupe of 30 to 50 million mid-sized monkeys disappearing from nature, each single year. This meat from the forest is a key source of animal protein for the world's poorest people, as well as for wealthier urbanites. The quantity is so enormous, however, that hunting is no longer sustainable. The results: an “empty forest” syndrome and a tragic loss of biodiversity.

Approaches to “solve” this “crisis” range from criminalising the poor (hunters) to technofixes that often fail. One thing is certain: nobody has the right to deny local populations an income from hunting or the consumption of a scarce source of animal protein. People in industrialised countries consume up to 10 times more meat, sourced from agricultural practises that are even more destructive – because based on feed produced in forest-destructive monocultures, such as soybeans and corn.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, experts have designed projects aimed at solving the bushmeat "crisis". Most of these strategies have been unsuccessful because they underestimated the complexities of the trade. Some of these relied on mono-dimensional notions of “protein substitution” (raise livestock in a modern way, and the problem will disappear), or on activity substitution (turn hunters into eco-tourist guides and the problem is solved). Almost all of these approaches have failed. More recently, more advanced and integrated ideas have taken hold, but these often result in unwanted consequences, such as an increased pressure on intact ecosystems.

Aware of these past attempts, the Biochar Fund developed an alternative strategy that may overcome some of these problems. It is based on a highly integrated agro-forestry system with polycultures of local crops and biochar at its core, and an energy component that relieves pressures on the environment.

The strategy

The concept (see diagram) builds on the classic notion of “protein substitution”, but circumvents the problem of producing animal feed on a large, monocultural scale. Instead we rely on local sources of animal fodder – polycultures of native grasses and grain crops – , grown in agroforestry systems based on biochar and nitrogen fixing trees (acacia). Because of the combination of biochar and organic nitrogen fixation, sustained high yields are possible at a low cost, and deforestation is reduced to a minimum.

In a second step, manure from the livestock will be digested in anaerobic digestors to produce biogas. This gas will be distributed to households who currently rely on firewood. Thus, again, some pressure on the local forest resource will be diminished. After digestion, the residues from the biogas plants are dried and undergo pyrolysis to generate biochar. This pyrolysis process yields a considerable amount of useful thermal energy, which will satisfy local drying needs. Current drying processes – to dry and smoke fish, meat, and other agricultural products – rely on inefficiently used firewood. Once more, our concept reduces this consumption of wood. Eventually, the production of highly-valued electricity may be integrated into the energy component.

When this integrated concept is implemented, a greener and more sustainable production of desirable animal protein will appear on the market and help ease the consumption of bushmeat. The biggest hurdle towards success is, however, local acceptance of this strategy by the key actors in the bushmeat sector.

Gender and ethnographic insight

Part of our project design process consisted of conducting ethnographic observations of the current culture of hunting. Interviews with hunters and their households revealed that, to increase acceptance and ownership of the project, we must approach the problem from a gender-perspective.

Hunting is a male activity par excellence, revolving around deeply rooted notions of strength, swiftness, mobility, cunningness, risk and transformative power. A hunter embodies the animal he is hunting, and needs to “tame” and “capture” its fugitive spirit by becoming it. Prestige and power are other key elements defining a hunter's life, which plays out at the interface between the highly ritual public sphere of the village, and the boundless, natural space of the forest from which he appears.

Women, on the contrary, are seen as “receptive”, “static”, “risk-averse” and “gestative” agents who dominate the domestic sphere and engage in the well-defined spaces of the farm and the hearth. Their transformative power is passive, as it relies on what the men bring to them (meat and money, which the women turn into food and domestic comfort).

This chain of strongly binary metonymic and metaphoric images is similar when it comes to the use of fire (and, potentially, biochar). Men and women use fire in distinctly different ways. It is the men only – the hunters whose wives cultivate the fields – , who claim the right to set fire to the forest and the fallow to free it up for cultivation. This use of fire is swift, risky, and “actively” transformative. Women, on the other hand, use fire only in a “passive” transformation, namely for cooking and during gestation, when pregnant women will sit close to the fire-place. Fire set “actively” to forests by men, is passively “received” as fertile soil by women, who will grow crops on it and turn them into food by the “passive” use of fire during cooking.

These ethnographic insights will allow us to blend our biochar concept into local knowledge and social metaphors. The prestige and power associated with a “modern” and publicly sited technology such as a pyrolysis and a biogas plant, attracts the interest of the men. However, at the same time, this use of fire can be seen as a modern way of “cooking” biomass, – it no longer involves the risky business of setting fire to open spaces, but instead it is a contained and concentrated way of using it. Thus, in a sense, biochar is “female”. Biochar may bridge the binary opposition currently witnessed when it comes to the use of fire and space by men and women. Advantage or disadvantage? This remains to be seen.

In all likeliness, women will remain the masters of the farm, and will become the managers of the agroforestry units that are at the core of our project. The men will manage the energy components, in as much as they convey power and prestige in the public sphere. They will also “tame” the profits that will arise from the project, and may limit their hunting activities, provided the financial incentive is strong enough. In our concept, hunters remain hunters with a difference. We do not “turn them into” ecotourism guides, as some conservationists have tried in the past.

Implementation

The project will take place in 10 villages around the town of Lalara, in the Département Okano of the Woleu-Ntem Province. This town is a central hub in the bushmeat trade supplying the country's capital, Libreville, Lambaréné and Port Gentil, the second largest city (pictured: a typical bushmeat market in Central Africa). Logging has opened up many of the forests in the region, allowing hunters to access its animal resources more easily. The result has been an intensification of the bushmeat trade.

In a first phase, ethnographies of local ecological knowledge and an investigation of the current trade chain will be undertaken. This will inform the implementation of all the components of our project.

In a second phase, the preferences for bushmeat will be analysed both at the level of the village, the town and the city. These profiles of “taste” will allow us to select the most suitable types of livestock (whether it be pigs, cows, “bush rats” or porcupines). A stock will be introduced and managed by modern means, by local households, in a semi-intensive way. After choosing the livestock, suitable local fodder crops will be identified and cultivated in combination with nitrogen-fixing trees. The energy component, consisting of biogas and pyrolysis units, will be introduced next.

Finally, we will help with the creation of a cooperative of livestock owners, consisting of our participants. They will implement a marketing strategy to sell their animal products to local and regional markets. This cooperative will also manage any carbon credits that may arise from the project. If successful, a replication strategy for the project will be designed, so that other communities may take up the concept in an efficient and rapid way.

The outcomes of this integrated project can be summed up as follows: a 50% reduction in the production of bushmeat by participating hunters; an increase in total household incomes by 50%, based on sales of the new animal products, controlled by our participants from farm to market (this may increase even further with eventual carbon credits); a 50% reduction of fire-wood consumption at the household level, because of a transition to biogas and the more efficient use of thermal energy for drying processes. The resulting decrease in the local rate of deforestation is hard to quantify, but it may be considerable. Obviously, the current pace at which the region loses its fauna biodiversity will be counter-acted by these results.