Prosperous middle class contributing to a growing appetite for ‘forest food’ By Andrew Buncombe, Asia correspondent As any visitor to Vietnam can confirm, its people have a remarkable taste for meals made from each and every creature. From snakes and spiders to monkeys and rats, there are few wild animals not prized when it comes to the cooking pot. But there is a price for this extreme omnivorousness. Experts have warned that the Vietnamese appetite for rare and exotic meat is threatening to eat many wild species into extinction. Among the animals most seriously at risk from the burgeoning demand for “forest food” are the rhino, the white-handed gibbon and the civet. “With the current situation of illegal hunting and trapping of wildlife, even hundreds of thousands of nature reserves fail to supply the demand,” Professor Dang Huy Huynh, chairman of the Vietnam Zoology Association, told a conference this week. The professor said up to 200 species are regularly traded, either for food or medicine, including lizards, wild cats, tigers, elephants and deer. Of these, around 80 species are threatened ones. In all, this trade results in 3,400 tonnes of wild meat – or a million individual animals – being consumed every year. Around 18 per cent of this meat is illegally hunted, he told the conference at the Van Long Wetland Nature Reserve in northern Vietnam. …
Vietnam’s taste for exotic meat threatens species
