PROBLEMS IN THE CONSERVATION OF RAINFORESTS IN CAMEROON

Abstract

The economic crisis and structural adjustments from late 1980s to early 1990s accelerated logging operations and agricultural expansion in Cameroon, which resulted in a massive destruction of the tropical forest in the southeastern part of the country. As such a forest destruction was posing local as well as global environmental problems, and attracted international attention, various projects have been promoted to save the forest ecosystems in Cameroon. While some of these projects are attempting new conservation measures, emphasizing active participation by local inhabitants, they are still facing difficulties for several reasons. This essay first examines the problems involved in the Western protectionism and nature aesthetics that prevailed in the conservation schemes of the last century. It also demonstrates that the new types of conservation attempts in the area, such as "community forest" and "adaptive management, " have not attained satisfactory results yet, due largely to insufficient information of the multiplex relationships between people and nature in the forest ecosystem and of complex ethnic relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers in the area. In order to properly understand the relationships of people with forest in a wider social and economic context, three types of ecological investigation are proposed here; (1) cultural ecology, to show how people's life and culture depend on the forest and its resources, (2) historical ecology, to evaluate short- and long-term impacts of human activities on the forest environment, and (3) political ecology to illustrate the relationship between the forest-related activities on the local level and the political and economic situations on the national and international levels.