Vol. 6 ˇ No. 1 ˇ 2002

Britta Jell and Jutta Schmidt Machado

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The region of Lac Lobéké is situated in the Congo Basin, in southeastern Cameroon. The Baka pygmies and several Bantu-speaking groups have lived here for centuries by agriculture, and hunting, fishing and collecting a great variety of forest products. The degradation and threat to biodiversity started with the arrival of German colonialists at the end of the nineteenth century. The colonisers provided incentives for the commercialisation of ivory, wood and non-timber forest products (NTFP), such as gum and strophantus. In the 1960s, international logging companies acquired concessions for logging, initiating an even more rapid process of environmental degradation and destruction. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), about 60 percent of the timber exported by Cameroon comes from illegal logging (Usongo June 2000). Additionally, easier access to the deeper forests and better transport conditions led to an increase in poaching of wildlife to such an extent that nowadays the biodiversity of the region is in very great danger.