There is a roaring trade in wild meat from the Amazon rainforest in big cities in Brazil, even though it is illegal. The economic value of the wild meat trade is now comparable to the timber trade.
While the trade poses risks to some species, it hasn’t pushed them to a crisis point as it has in parts of Africa and Asia, says Thaís Morcatty at Oxford Brookes University, UK. “We can draw a different story,” she says. “We see a potential for regulating the activity.”
Morcatty and her colleagues surveyed 1046 households in five cities in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which is almost entirely covered in the dense forest of the Amazon. They found that 80 per cent of interviewees ate some wild meat, on an average of 29 days per year. Most of them bought the meat from local markets or other traders.
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Assuming the cities sampled are typical, the team estimates that up to 10,691 tonnes of wild meat are eaten every year in the Amazon’s 62 cities. Based on the value of the meats, that means the wild meat trade could be worth $35.1 million per year – on a par with the mineral and timber trades in the area.
The team identified 21 species that were being eaten. The most eaten by weight were pig-like animals called , , rodents called , and .
The animals are caught by rural people living in isolated regions of the Amazon rainforest, who then sell them on. “These people are not bad,” says Morcatty, because they are typically good stewards of the forest. Many grow crops, but this is seasonal so in some months they have no other income.
However, some of the species, like tapirs, are long-lived and slow to reproduce, which makes them vulnerable to population crashes if they are overhunted.
“We need different solutions,” says Morcatty. Simply banning the trade hasn’t worked, because law enforcement is weak and in any case the people buying the meat don’t see themselves as breaking the law. “It has to be regulated,” says Morcatty. Some hunting should be allowed, but species that cannot cope with being hunted must be protected. She says breeding some species in captivity may also help take the pressure off wild populations.
“In this instance I could see the benefits of legalising the trade, but for particular species,” says Richard Thomas of TRAFFIC, the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, in Cambridge, UK.
Similar approaches . In the in Ecuador, people used to hunt animals to supply wild meat markets in nearby cities, . The meat was sold “as a luxury meat”. However, the people have since stopped commercial hunting and now catch only what they need for themselves, so the market has closed down. To make up for the lost income, .
Conservation Biology
