Do villages in forests threaten biodiversity? Can species survive only where there’s a fence keeping them in and people out? CIFOR’s Anne Marie Tiani and Chimere Diaw tackle these perennially debated issues in a study of Korup National Park in Cameroon.

National parks in Africa were not invented by local people. European colonizers created the myth of an African wilderness, inhabited only by animals, not by people. From this myth was born the notion of creating vast stretches of protected areas where man, child or woman were forbidden to settle.

Korup National Park in southwest Cameroon is a modern but classic example. The lands covered by the Park contain some of Africa’s oldest rainforests. For the past five hundred years they have been the ancestral homelands for the thousand people still there today.

When the national park was set up in 1986 (with the assistance of western environmental groups) the park managers assumed the people living in Korup were hunters and gatherers.

They further assumed that hunting and gathering negatively impacted on the local biodiversity.

Using these assumptions to guide them, the park managers decided it would be in the best interests of local livelihoods and the surrounding flora and fauna to resettle the communities living in the park.

“The managers felt that to reduce pressure on the park’s wildlife and to save the pristine wilderness the people would have to be re-located outside the park,” explains CIFOR researcher, Anne Marie Tiani.

“Local people were told to give up their traditional lands and make way for a people-free park. In return, they were offered development support, such as housing and infrastructure.”

Following protracted negotiations, one village, Ikundu-Kundu, was resettled outside the park in 1999.

Several years after the resettlement, CIFOR worked with the resettled village, as well as villages that remained in Korup. The aim was to determine how relocation impacts on both livelihoods and biodiversity.

According to CIFOR researcher, Chimere Diaw, there is no question certain aspects of life improved.

“The roads were better. People had better access to the urban market and their incomes increased. On the other hand, certain cultural values got lost. Many women complained of less access to fish, drinking water and non-timber forest products such as palm nuts,” Diaw says.

“And the young people complained about the wildlife at the new site, saying they sometimes return to their old ‘forest turf’ in the national park to hunt and collect food.”

The impact of resettlement on biodiversity conservation is similarly ambiguous.

“In the short run, some positive outcomes emerge”, says Tiani. “Animals that like secondary forests can find a rich habitat in the abandoned area and poaching decreases. But in the long run, poaching may well increase because the establishment of the national park and the resettlement weaken traditional control systems without putting in alternative measures, such as efficient, well-trained park officers.”

According to Diaw, before resettlement, outsiders were required to seek permission from the local elders before entering the forest areas to carry out any hunting, fishing, gathering or farming activities. These elders also set a quota for how much bushmeat could be killed and carried away.

“But today,” says Diaw, “Outsiders challenge the elders’ authority. Areas that used to be managed through customary rules can become open to anyone with a gun or axe.”

As intended by the architects of the relocation scheme, the displaced population of Ikundu-Kundu did do more agriculture and less hunting and gathering at their new site.
Diaw argues the money spent on resettling the village could have been wisely invested in supporting the village to develop sustainable farming on its former site.

“This would have improved livelihoods as equally as resettlement did and also have reduced the pressure on wildlife,” Diaw says.

“There would have been a risk of forest degradation. But this was also a risk at the new site. In fact, in the new village, the resettled families and hired workers have transformed the primary forest into plantations and food crops. But if still at their original site, they’d have transformed fallows and secondary forests.”

Tiani says dubious assumptions underpinned the relocation decision. “Managers at the time regarded human settlements in Korup as a threat to biodiversity because the people would be mainly hunters and gatherers. But scientific research tells us the majority of these people were and are farmers. Fish, not meat, is their primary source of animal protein. Game consumption is moderate.”

Despite CIFOR’s thorough research, this is a vast area of inquiry in need of much more data. Without this data it is impossible to clearly prove local communities constitute a threat to wildlife in Korup National Park, let alone assume this is true of all communities in all national parks. In fact, as Diaw and Tiani’s research shows, biodiversity may be at a greater risk if resettlement weakens a forest area’s traditional system of management and authority. CD, AMT, JR