Oil And Wildlife Don't Mix In Ecuador's Eden

What harm can a simple road do in a pristine place such as Ecuador's Yasuni National Park, home to peccaries, tapirs, monkeys and myriad other wildlife species? A great deal, it turns out.

Specifically, it can turn subsistence communities into commercial hunting camps that empty rainforests of their wildlife, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society http://www.wcs.org/ and the IDEAS-Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador have found.

A study by WCS field scientists in the park found that the presence of a single road in a protected area and the subsidies provided by oil companies to local people can fundamentally change how indigenous communities use their resources by providing both access to deeper parts of the forest and a cheap means of getting meat to nearby wildlife markets.

The study appears in the most recent issue of the journal Animal Conservation.

"We've found that a road in a forest can bring huge social changes to local groups and the ways in which they utilize wildlife resources," said WCS and USFQ researcher Esteban Suárez, lead author of the study. "Communities existing inside and around the park are changing their customs to a lifestyle of commercial hunting, the first stage in a potential overexploitation of wildlife."

" A simple, seemingly inoffensive road can have far-reaching effects on a landscape and its people," said Dr. Avecita Chicchón, Director of WCS's Latin America and Caribbean Program. "It provides hunters with more access to a wider range of forest while providing a low-cost transportation route to markets. More importantly, it plugs communities more easily into the larger economic world while creating increased demand for numerous species of animals. It is the road to unsustainability."

In the study, WCS scientists measured the levels of wild meat sold in a market in Pompeya, located about 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) outside Yasuni National Park, between the years 2005-2007. The study also examined the effects of a road constructed in 1992 by oil company Maxus Ecuador Inc. that traverses more than 149 kilometers (92 miles) into the protected area.

The majority of animals brought in by hunters were pacas (mid-sized Amazonian rodents), white-lipped peccaries, collared peccaries, and woolly monkeys comprising some 80 percent of the total biomass monitored.

The wild meat market emerged shortly after the construction of the road. Although road access was strictly controlled, the oil companies operating this concession provided free travel along the road for hunters from local Waorani communities, according to the study