May 2020, ScientificAmerican.com 61impact of logging, however, they might have withheld consent.
Previously, if anyone wanted to enter the forest, they had to
have Pygmy guides, and if the hunter-gatherers did not approve
of them, they would not take them. But the network of logging
roads gave commercial poachers—who hunted not for their own
consumption but for insatiable domestic and international mar-
kets—access to pristine areas without the Pygmies being able to
control them. They used the new roads to intensively raid the for-
est for meat to feed urban consumers. So lucrative was the bush-
meat trade that it spawned well-organized poaching networks,
often promoted by elite sponsors such as military or police offi-
cials. In addition, as logging camps sprang up deep inside the for-
est, they attracted Bantu villagers from its periphery, who arrived
to provide food and other services to the workers. The resulting
shantytowns grew to each contain hundreds of settlers, many of
whom also began to hunt for bushmeat.
Frustrated conservationists from the WCS, the World Wildlife
Fund (WWF) and other organizations responded by employing
squads of eco-guards to police wildlife crime, inadvertently cre-
ating militias they could not control. Many of the guards began
to extract wealth from the forest, sometimes cooperating with the
poaching networks, and they beat and tortured the Pygmies if
they found them with wild meat, even if it had been legally hunted.
After human-rights organizations publicized these abuses in the
2000s, conservation organizations formally distanced themselves
from the eco-guards by encouraging local governments to inte-
grate them into their respective forestry ministries. They contin-
ued to support the forces financially and logistically, but they
could no longer discipline or fire them, reducing accountability.
Around 2010, conservation agencies began to collaborate with
logging companies to police poaching in the concessions that bor-
dered protected areas. The loggers audited the eco-guards for
numbers of arrests and seizures of contraband (such as bushmeat).
Unable to act against the powerful perpetrators of the illegal wild-
life trade, eco-guards began to attack softer targets: the hunter-
gatherers and villagers. Although local people were legally allowed
to hunt cert ain species for subsistence using traditional methods,
in practice the eco-guards took possession of any meat as evidence
of poaching to justify intimidation, torture and beatings.
Worsening the problem, from 2007 onward China had been
building roads and other infrastructure in the Congo in lieu of
mining and other rights. Hundreds of Chinese workers arrived for
road construction—an influx that coincided with a major increase
in elephant poaching. The roads constructed by loggers connected
with the national roads built by Chinese contractors to establish
an efficient transportation network for ivory and bushmeat.
Wildlife protectors reacted to the accelerated poaching by dou-
bling down on “fortress conservation,” as Victoria Tauli-Corpuz,
the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples,
and others describe it. The WCS, the WWF and others expanded
the existing national parks by connecting them into cross-border
“conservation landscapes” such as the 750,000-hectare Sangha Tri-
national, which includes the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. Often
working with extractive industries, development agencies and con-
servation organizations continued to conceive of new protected
areas in the Congo Basin without the consent of local people. This
past March investigators from the U.N. Development Program
reported that Baka Pygmies of northwestern Congo were alleging
“indiscriminate violence, humiliation and intimidation” by WWF-
supervised eco-guards, who were evicting them from within the
boundaries of the proposed Messok Dja National Park. “As a result,BAYAKA ELDERS Ngeshe and Ngwenye wear white clay on their fore-
heads ( 1 ) in December 2019 to mourn a recently deceased sister. Un able
to pursue their original forest-based way of life, they live mostly near
Indongo, a former logging camp. Keyo ( right ) and her friend sit close by,
on abandoned forestry machinery ( 2 ). At a sacred glade in the vicinity,
Emeka, now around 60, explains how the BaYaka care for the forest ( 3 ).3