The Baka garden will raise awareness of rainforests beyond the Amazon and highlight the pressures faced by all those who live in them as well as focusing on the broader impact – in terms of climate- that the destruction of rainforests will bring.
The Baka have only recently started to cultivate plants. Their gardens are one of the few buffers between the Baka and starvation. Logging, and its attendant trade in bush meat, means that the Baka struggle to find food. Pressures on the rainforest affect more than the wide variety of male-only animals that make up the Baka diet.
Earlier this year I stayed with a community of Baka for a few days in a remote part of southern Cameroon a few miles from UNESCO’s 526, 000 hectare World Heritage Dja reserve. I was shocked by the threats that the rainforest there is facing and, with it, the ‘double whammy effect’ (as Prince Charles puts it) on global warming. When a group of women took me dam fishing their heavy work was rewarded by a catch of tiddlers worthy of a whitebait first course in the UK.
Now, to add to the Baka’s problems, an open cast nickel and cobalt mine is about to open (it may be working by May 2010). The mine will be within 30 K of UNESCO’s Dja reserve. Permission has been granted to mine 1,250 square kilometres of rainforest. This will have a massive impact on the Baka and the isolated plantlife in the area which supports 107 species of mammal, five of them endangered. In another development, east of the Dja, 830,000 hectares of rainforest in the Ngoyla Mintom is about to be logged with all the attendant threats to global warming, biodiversity and the Baka who have lived in isolation, and in harmony with the forest, for thousands of years.
The Baka women want to highlight this issue to the world and support this application for a garden at Chelsea.
