Gorilla Tourism and the Charcoal Trade

Photo from and thanks to the Gorilla Protection website.

A year ago this July six members of the Rugendo family of gorillas were murdered in Congo's Virunga National Park, and everything we've read about the incident describes how entirely upsetting it was to all the humans involved in retrieving and burying the bodies. The administrator of the Gorilla Protection website was there and recounts the sad procession.

To commemorate the first anniversary, National Geographic magazine, arriving in mailboxes this week, asks on its cover, Who Murdered the Mountain Gorillas, and to compliment the article, the article's photographer, Brent Stirton, sat for a long interview last week on NPR's Fresh Air.

The consensus answer to who committed the murders centers around rivalries in the illegal charcoal trade in the park, said to be worth some $30 million a year. Charcoal demand is high in the nearby town of Goma, Congo, on the border with Rwanda. Displaced people have grown Goma's population to some 700,000. There is little electricity, so charcoal is essential to heat homes, cook food and boil drinking water.

But the charcoal trade is illegal because gorillas need a habitat of dense foliage, as they eat up to sixty pounds a day, and burning wood to make charcoal destroys the gorilla habitat. Estimates are the total gorilla population on earth is down to something maybe slightly over 700.

Virunga, where Congo, Uganda and Rwanda come together, was Africa's first National Park, dating to 1925. On the other side of the chain of volcanoes along the border are the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda and the Parc National des Volcans in Rwanda, where visitors (including us in August) pay $500 per day for government permits to trek to see the gorillas. Versus the estimated $30 million charcoal trade in Congo, gorilla tourism in Uganda and Rwanda brings in an estimated $8 million annually.

 

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