OCCASIONAL PAPER Agouti on the wedding menu Bushmeat harvest, consumption and trade in a post-frontier region of the Ecuadorian Amazon Ian Cummins Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez Alexander Barnard Robert Nasi OCCASIONAL PAPER 138 Agouti on the wedding menu Bushmeat harvest, consumption and trade in a post-frontier region of the Ecuadorian Amazon Ian Cummins Runa Foundation Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability (EICES) Alexander Barnard University of California Robert Nasi Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Occasional Paper 138 © 2015 Center for International Forestry Research Content in this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN 978-602-387-009-7 DOI: 10.17528/cifor/005730 Cummins I, Pinedo-Vasquez M, Barnard A and Nasi R. 2015. Agouti on the wedding menu: Bushmeat harvest, consumption and trade in a post-frontier region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Occasional Paper 138. Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR. Photo by Alonso Pérez Ojeda Del Arco Buying bushmeat for a wedding CIFOR Jl. CIFOR, Situ Gede Bogor Barat 16115 Indonesia T +62 (251) 8622-622 F +62 (251) 8622-100 E [email protected] cifor.org We would like to thank all donors who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund. For a list of Fund donors please see: https://www.cgiarfund.org/FundDonors Any views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of CIFOR, the editors, the authors’ institutions, the financial sponsors or the reviewers. Contents Acknowledgments v Summary vi 1 Synthesis 1 2 Introduction 3 2.1 Opposing views and controversies on the sustainability of bushmeat 3 2.2 Road and other infrastructure in the post-frontier Amazon 3 2.3 Advances in the biodiversity database 4 2.4 Bushmeat: The Ecuadorian legal framework and law enforcement 5 2.5 The bushmeat harvest in defaunated forests and landscapes 5 2.6 Bushmeat trade: A complex game in Ecuador 6 2.7 Regional trends in the Amazonian bushmeat trade 7 3 The Napo province: Site description 9 3.1 Biophysical characteristics 9 3.2 Napo as a post-frontier landscape 9 4 Surveys and interviews 14 5 Results 15 5.1 Two different hunting systems identified 15 5.2 The effect of catchment size and habitat availability on offtakes 19 6 Discussion 22 7 Recommendations 23 8 Works cited 24 List of figures and tables Figures 1 Napo and Sucumbios provinces have the highest population density and a large fraction of this population is constituted by Kichwa and other indigenous people. 10 2 Napo and Orellana provinces have the most extensive network of roads in the Ecuadorian Amazon. 12 3 Forested landscapes of the North and Central Amazon are increasingly changing to mosaic landscapes dominated by agriculture fields. 13 4 A managed forest fragment where several species of trees are managed as game attractors (left). A cassava field with palm trees that are used for trapping small rodents and birds (right). 15 5 A deadfall trap for hunting small game species. 16 Tables 1 Land cover and infrastructure by province. 13 2 List of 17 most common game attractor tree species planted, protected and managed using the chacra system. 17 3 Bushmeat prices by point of sale. 18 4 Large-game species on wedding menus (2013). 19 Acknowledgments We would like to thank Mercedes and Robin for comments and suggestions on the first draft of this their support and assistance in negotiating with manuscript. We are grateful to USAID and DFID for local communities and hunters, as well as for their providing the core funding for this case study. enthusiastic participation in data gathering. The study and preparation of this manuscript would This study was part of the Program on Forest, Tree not have been possible without the support and and Agroforestry (FTA) that is conducted by a encouragement of Eliot Logan-Hines. We would CGIAR consortium led by CIFOR composed of also like to thank the reviewers for their detailed CATIE, CIAT, ICRAF, Bioversity and CIRAD. Photo by Ian Cummins Summary Subsistence hunting has become one of the main that are enhancing or limiting the sustainability sources of employment and household income of subsistence bushmeat harvesting on: (1) prey for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the population dynamics in a multi-species prey Ecuadorian Amazon. As indigenous and non- community, (2) the diversity of management systems indigenous Amazonians are becoming urbanized and of habitat for game species in mosaic landscapes their communities connected by networks of roads dominated by smallholders’ land-use systems, and to cities and towns, chickens and canned meat are (3) the size and composition of prey populations in becoming their main source of protein, and bushmeat hunting landscapes that are connected by roads to is becoming an important source of household urban centers. income. Subsistence hunting frequently targets many prey species simultaneously, with urbanized low- We argue that sustainable bushmeat procurement income indigenous and non-indigenous residents in depends several interrelated factors such as local increasingly interconnected hunting landscapes. Yet capacity for maintaining and managing habitat our understanding is limited about the dynamics of diversity, access to diversify sources of household hunting in such multi-prey systems. income as well as on distinctive prey profiles at different intensities of hunting. Therefore, the risk Herein we discuss the impact of landscape of overexploitation depends on lost of (i) habitat, connectivity and urban expansion on subsistence (ii) sources of household income and species’ hunting in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We analyze the vulnerabilities to hunting pressures due to access inter-dependence of a set of variables that includes: to roads and means of transportation to cities and (1) supply and demand of bushmeat with resp ect towns. We propose field-based analytical frameworks to regional urban markets, (2) catch per unit effort, that can help indigenous and non-indigenous (3) frequency of hunting expeditions, (4) access communities, as well as local authorities, increase to hunting grounds and (5) hunter behaviors and their capacity to establish monitoring systems at the collective practices. We discuss the multiple factors village, district and regional level. Photo by Pablo Puertas 1 Synthesis Over the last three decades, the Ecuadorian bushmeat harvesting patterns, as well as to promote Amazon has undergone large-scale socio-economic, sustainable practices. In most post-frontier regions, demographic and biophysical transformations the populations of large-game species (e.g. white- that have greatly shaped local patterns of land and lipped peccary) are experiencing accelerated resource use with major repercussions on local declines (Franzen 2006; Sierra et al. 2008), while livelihoods, environments and biodiversity. This the population of small-game species (e.g. rodents) paper aims to characterize transitions in patterns of remains relatively robust and has become the main bushmeat harvesting, marketing and consumption source of food and income of low-income urban and brought about by these changes, with an emphasis rural households (Browder 2002; Chacon 2012). on the impact of road building, the movement of isolated communities and the connectivity of forests Since the law banning the sale and consumption to urban centers. We use the literature and field of bushmeat in cities and towns has started to be data collected in the provinces of Napo and Pastaza enforced, official reports and published articles to explore (a) whether current levels of bushmeat suggest the availability of bushmeat in open or consumption, trade and associated extraction rates legal markets has declined significantly, while the are sustainable, and (b) whether these ongoing underground market has likely increased. Although processes likely enhance or limit the sustainable it is difficult to estimate the volume of bushmeat management of game species, habitat diversity, the consumed and sold in underground markets, law conservation of biodiversity and the sustainable enforcement is leading to a robust clandestine livelihood of local populations. market. Efforts to enforce conservation laws have increasingly driven the bushmeat trade underground In response to the Convention on Biological Diversity and created localized trading networks operating in in 1992, the Government of Ecuador has established diverse and complex supplier-consumer networks. legal, political and economic incentives to confront the Consequently, changes in consumer preference national and global biodiversity crisis. Conservation and increasing urban purchasing power have led initiatives and incentives have greatly increased the to a transition of bushmeat from being essentially institutional and technical capacity of governmental a sustenance item to a source of income for low- and nongovernmental institutions to manage forests income rural and urban families. and landscapes for the conservation and protection of biodiversity. In Ecuador, while subsistence hunting We found that bushmeat in Ecuador is characterized is legal, commercial hunting and sale are not. by one of two primary hunting systems. The first is However, since commercial hunting is almost non- garden hunting, which primarily focuses on