Massive reserve for bonobos
2007-11-20 21:05
Kinshasa - The Congo is setting aside more than 301 000ha of rain forest to help protect the endangered bonobo, a great ape that is the most closely related to humans and is found only in this Central African country.
US agencies, conservation groups and the Congolese government have come together to set aside the tropical rain forest area, the US-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative said in a statement.
The area amounts to just over 1% of the vast country - but means a park larger than the state of Massachusetts and only slightly smaller than the entire country of Slovakia.
Reserve aims to protect largest rain forest area
Environment Minister Didace Pembe said the area was denoted as a protected reserve last week as part of the administration's goal of setting aside 15% of its forest as protected area.
The Sankuru nature reserve aims to protect a section of Africa's largest rain forest from the commercial bushmeat trade and from deforestation by industrial logging operations in the central part of the country known as the Congo Basin.
Sally Jewell Coxe, president of the Washington-based Bonobo Conservation Initiation, said the group has been working to establish the reserve since 2005, when it started meeting with leaders in villagers that ring the area to persuade them to stop hunting the ape.
Surveys have been hard to carry out
Though local lore holds that washing a baby with the ashy remains of a bonobo will make the child strong, Coxe said many pinhabitants of villages have undertaken to end the practice.
The bonobo population is believed to have declined sharply in the last 30 years, though surveys have been hard to carry out in war-ravaged central Congo and estimates range from 60 000 to fewer than 5 000, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
The Sankuru reserve also contains okapi, closely related to the giraffe that is also native to the Congo, elephants and at least 10 other primate species, the group said.
- AP