Alarming disappearance of wildlife.

• Author: Mateus, Paul Tufino
• Position: VIEWPOINT

Ecuador is one of the seventeen most diverse countries on the planet, rich in biodiversity and endemic species. Even there, however, where it is still possible to find considerable extensions of tropical and subtropical rainforest, there have been signs of large scale extinction of wildlife. It is a panorama of empty forests, where the vegetation appears normal but there are almost no animals.

Alarming statistics point to the occurrence of ecological extinction of animals in Ecuador and in all the other countries of the region. This phenomenon is demystifying the western vision of indigenous peoples as guardians of the forest and showing that what conservationists have done so far in protected areas hasn't been enough to slow, let alone solve, the problem. In an article titled "The Empty Forest" (BioScience Magazine, 1992) Kent H. Redford, the vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said, "Many large animals are already ecologically extinct in vast areas of neo-tropical forests where the vegetation still appears intact."

For many years, people took from the forests as many animals as they could hunt. But now, indigenous peoples are experiencing hunger as they continue to eke out their survival by hunting large and medium sized mammals, birds, and fish. In a recent conference on food security in Quito, Marcelo Moreano, an officer of the United Nations World Food Program for Ecuador, spoke of the Awa indigenous leader who had moved him by pleading: "Help us to plant more meat in the forests."

That expression from the lips of the indigenous leader is far from being nonsensical. It expresses one of the biggest problems for conservation in the tropics today and sensitizes us to the hunger and malnutrition that is resulting from the disappearance of animals that indigenous people have depended on for centuries.

While the problem of animal extinction is not new, many people have a hard time believing that that we could fined ourselves with empty forests, and conservationists have often projected the idea that indigenous people live in harmony with nature and therefore could not possibly participate in overhunting. They have also often convinced us that the best way to assure the survival of different species, especially large mammals, is simply to preserve the ecosystems that they need by creating protected areas.

The Convention on Biological Diversity, signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, points to the need to conserve...