Charles Kazooba
6 July 2006
Kampala — If no sweeping measures are taken, Great Apes in Rwanda and the neighbouring countries may be extinct in the next 50 years, a UN official has warned. "All the species of the great ape face a major extinction in the near future or best over the next 50 years,"
Klaus Toepfer of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in Kampala recently, during an exhibition organised by the Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP), an organisation that focuses on unifying conservation efforts.
During the on-going three-month exhibition that began June 28, officials from GRASP identified habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting for bush meat, illegal burning of forests, mining, war and local conflicts and expansion of agriculture as some of the factors that will fuel the extinction of apes in the region.
The other factors, GRASP official said, are diseases and excessive and illegal logging.
'Current conservation efforts are not enough, with the current trends suggesting that all species will be extinct in this century and some within a few decades, new mechanisms must be created to reverse this trajectory', the GRASP officials said at the exhibition that aims at raising the profile of apes through public awareness of their value, status and threats.
The Gorillas that keep wandering between Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are a major tourist attraction for gorilla tracking, an activity that has widely boosted foreign exchange for both Rwanda and Uganda.
"It is one minute to midnight for the great apes," Toepfer insisted and echoed earlier assertions that the apes are being decimated by deforestation, hunting and diseases.
Contacted for comment, the Director General of the National Tourism Office (ORTPN), Rosette Chantal Rugamba, said the respective institutions in the region and their partners had engaged in research as a means of protecting the gorillas in the Virunga Massive.
She enumerated several preventive measures that have been put in place to avoid human-to-gorilla and gorilla-to-human transmission of diseases.
Rugamba further said that initiatives working with the coBoth Bwindi Impenetrable Park in south western Uganda and Volcanoes National Park are home to the last 700 mountain gorillas and Uganda and Rwanda have signed the Albertine Rift Declaration drafting modalities of conservation efforts in the apes' habitat.
Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates 3,000 to 6,000 great apes are killed by humans annually through poaching, while the United Nations considers that US$25m must be invested immediately to save the last great apes, especially by creating protected zones.
"Those that are nearest to areas inhabited by humans are most in danger. Rural populations and armed bandits kill them primarily for food," World Wildlife says.
In a related development, the 2002 UNEP Report indicates that less than 10% of the forest habitat of Africa's great apes will still be intact by 2030.
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