Mbuti pygmy men, from left, Faizi Malambi, Kawaya Situka, Besei and Kange Ambali carry hunting nets and spears as they await the start of the day's hunt in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve outside the town of Epulu, Congo, on March 18. The pygmies' traditional practice of hunting bushmeat has devolved into an all-out commercial endeavor, staged not for subsistence, but to feed growing regional markets. The result: the forests that remain are growing emptier by the day. Rebecca Blackwell / AP

By TODD PITMAN, Associated Press
updated 7/3/2010 9:39:02 PM ET THE ITURI FOREST, Congo — They emerge from the stillness of the rainforest like a lost tribe of prehistoric warriors forgotten by time — a barefoot band of Mbuti Pygmies wielding iron-tipped spears. The men come first, cloaked head to toe in coiled hunting nets shaved from the liana vine. Then the women, lugging hand-woven baskets filled with the same bloodstained antelope their ancestors survived on for thousands of years. And waiting anxiously in the middle of their smoke-filled hunting camp: a horde of village traders who’ve come to buy as much bushmeat as the Mbuti can bring. Time has long stood still in the innermost reaches of northeast Congo’s Ituri Forest — a remote and crepuscular world without electricity or cell phones that’s so isolated, the Pygmies living here have never heard of Barack Obama or the Internet or the war in Afghanistan. But the future is coming, on a tidal wave of demand for game meat that’s pushing an army of tall Bantu traders ever deeper into Africa’s primordial vine-slung jungles. It’s a demand so voracious, experts warn it could drive some of Africa’s last hunter-gatherers to eradicate the very wildlife that sustains them, and with it, their own forest-dwelling existence. Over the last few decades, that existence has been vanishing at astonishing rates across the continent, as forests are ripped apart amid soaring population growth and legions of Pygmies are forced into settled lives on the outskirts of society. One place — Congo’s Okapi Wildlife Reserve — was supposed to be a bulwark against the onslaught, a place where commercial hunting is banned. But an Associated Press team that hiked two days to join one Pygmy band found the thriving bushmeat trade penetrating even into the protected zone. … According to the United Nations, Africa is losing 10 million acres of trees annually — an area the size of Switzerland — because of uncontrolled logging, mining and mass waves of migrants desperate for land. The fundamental problem: Congo’s population — 70 million people and counting — is about three times what it was three decades ago. By 2020, it could reach 120 million. … The result: the forests still standing are growing emptier by the day. Some have suffered 90 percent drops in wildlife, stripped so bare, hunters have been reduced to eating their own hunting dogs, says John Hart, an American conservationist who first lived among the Mbuti in the 1970s. …

In Congo forest, bushmeat trade threatens Pygmies