Nearly one-third of primates in peril: world conservation body

GENEVA (AFP) - - Nearly a third of all non-human primates could be wiped out, threatened by illegal wildlife trade, climate change and destruction of their habitat, a new report warned on Friday.

Twenty-nine percent of all monkeys, apes and gorilla species are now in danger of going extinct, according to the report by the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (IUCN).

It highlighted 25 species it said were most endangered, including the Greater bamboo and white-collared lemurs in Madagascar, and the exotically-named Miss Waldron's red colobus monkey in West Africa.

"You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium; that's how few of them remain on Earth today," warned Russell Mittermeier, chairman of the IUCN's Primate Specialist Group.

The report, compiled by 60 experts from 21 countries, warned that failure to respond to these threats could lead to the first primate extinctions in over a century.

"Hunters kill primates for food and to sell the meat; traders capture them for live sale; and loggers, farmers, and land developers destroy their habitat," it said.

The Miss Waldron's species in Ivory Coast and Ghana is already feared extinct, while the golden-headed langur of Vietnam and China's Hainan gibbon are thought to number just a few dozen, it added.

The IUCN said deforestation was the main factor behind the declining number of primates.
It also produces 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change -- more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and aeroplanes combined.

"By protecting the world's tropical forests, we save primates and other endangered species while preventing more carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere to warm the climate," Mittermeier said.

The research, presented at the International Primatological Society (IPS) on the Chinese tropical island of Hainan, was compiled by a team of 60 IUCN experts.

Meanwhile, a meeting on primate habitats, chaired by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Paris, concluded on Friday with an initiative to help the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the last redoubts of the gorilla.

UNEP said it would provide 300,000 dollars (210,000 euros) to the three-million-dollar programme, aimed at helping sustainable livelihoods among people living around the park, the agency said in a press release.

The gorillas face loss of habitat from deforestation, as trees are chopped down from fuel, as well as from poaching.

A newspaper report presented objectively, but in and of itself, it presents very, very poignantly, how the world's primates are destined to be extinguished, one-by-one, species-by-species. And it surely raises a plethora of concerns, that questions how we go about our lives as consumers, as tourists, as inevitable contributors to pollution, to the death of the primates.

Our actions, sure, do not trigger butterfly effect-like phenomenons, but each bit of them build to a movement that is necessarily wasteful of nature, habitats and animals. Yes, there may be a growing animal movement across the world, but is it enough? Is the sheer number of grassroots efforts, NGOs' investment sufficient to compensate for animalkind wasting away? Or can we do more, can we spread an animal welfare consciousness far and wide enough that each and everyone of us -- corporations, communities, consumers -- practise an awareness that bears no ill effect on ANY animal?

I do not have definite answers to these questions, but I do know that there is no such thing as pointlessness is our ongoing efforts to educate and rescue. Keep going.