Ugandan chimps threatened by massive felling of forests

By Henry Wasswa Jun 11, 2007, 4:01 GMT

Kampala Somewhere in the remote jungles of western and north-western Uganda, a struggle for survival reigns between the areas impoverished peasants and chimpanzees.

Ecologists here are worried that the already endangered primates are losing the battle for land in a country where forests are being decimated at a fast rate.

The chimps are either killed, wounded, left homeless or orphaned and multi-pronged efforts are being made by conservationists to both save the habitat of the chimps and protect those orphaned or displaced.

'We are very concerned about the habitat of the primates. People cut down the forests for gardens and timber and the chimps get displaced. The chimps fight and the humans fight back and the chimps are either killed or orphaned, the executive director of the state- owned Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA),' Moses Mapesa told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Uganda has over 5000 chimps in the wild and those threatened are mostly in privately-owned forests in the Bunyoro region in north and north-western Uganda.

UWA rescues the abandoned and orphaned chimps and hands them over to ecologists at Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary situated on an island on Lake Victoria.

The wooded island situated 60 kilometres south of the capital Kampala, is at present home to 42 rescued chimps.

The centre funded by international conservation groups and the Ugandan government was founded in 1998 but ecologists there are worried that the number of chimps being orphaned and taken there for refuge are on the increase.

The sanctuary's executive director, Lillian Ajerova, told dpa that, some of the big forests which existed before have been cut down or become fragmented with the chimps finding themselves in different locations.

'At the moment we have 42 chimps at Ngamba island. These include 17 males. The oldest chimp is 25 years and the youngest about a year. There is an indication that the number of orphaned chimps is on the increase,' she said by telephone.

'In 1998, we started with 19 chimps. Now we have 42 and in the last year, we got five chimps that had been rescued. This is a very, very big number which was got in only a period of six months. This shows that the problem is getting bigger,' Ajerova said.

Statistics from the government National Forest Authority NFA indicate that Uganda's forest cover has been reduced from 4.9 million hectares to 3.6 million hectares between 1990 to 2005.

Forests cover 24 per-cent of the East African countrys total land surface to-date, a fall from over 70 per-cent 100 years ago, NFA says. Environmentalists are embarking on a programme among the people living around the chimpanzee areas, sensitizing them on conservation, advising them on the crops to grow and empowering them with skills.

'We are trying to see how we can move together to minimize the problem. Among others, this involves education and provision of skills to women,' Ajerova said.

According to Mapesa,'we want to address the problem in such a way that the humans co-exist with the chimps.'