On the menu, claim campaigners

A Labour MP has launched a campaign to end the illegal trade of African bushmeat.

Joining forces with a wide range of conservation and animal welfare charities, Barry Gardiner is seeking to highlight the peril posed to endangered species, the diets of poor "traditional" African communities and the risk of illegal bushmeat triggering another foot and mouth epidemic in the UK.

The MP believes that illegal bushmeat has become a trade of "mammoth proportions". "We're talking about five million tonnes of meat being traded each year, with market trade of about £180 million," he said.

"The result is that the poorest people who used to rely on bushmeat as cheap source of local food are seeing all their traditional sources dry up and that is putting increasing pressure on endangered species, which are being shot killed and becoming part of the export trade."

He says the money generated from the traffic in bushmeat is "not going into" the pockets of the poor. "It is going into the pockets of the criminal gangs who are running it," he said.

Infrastructural improvements funded through international aid are being misused to traffic bushmeat, Gardiner believes.

"Some of the Western-led development projects, which have merit in there own right, like roads and transport infrastructure, are opening up the routes by which the very poorest people are being pushed into food insecurity by the commercialisation of the bushmeat trade," he said.

"Pushing poor people under at the same time as pushing endangered species into extinction."

The campaigners are urging the government to take the illegal trade as seriously as alcohol and cigarette smuggling. Gardiner warns that the price of ignoring the peril posed by bushmeat to the UK could be another foot and mouth epidemic.

"We're calling on the government to put in place a series of measures. We're asking Gordon Brown to put resources into tackling the bushmeat problem," he said.

"There have been clampdowns on alcohol, and cigarette smuggling but government hasn't focused on this trade at all, which is potentially far more damaging to the UK economy. If you look at the fact that foot and mouth was started by suspect meat coming against health and safety regulations and yet it is estimated that there are 1000 tonnes of this illegal meat coming into Heathrow and other ports each year."

Gardiner believes that "big premiums in Western markets for Gorillas" are leading to a situation where "whole smoked animals are being brought into the country".

He believes criminal gangs are supplying the meat to communities from countries like "Ghana, Liberia, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, from Central Africa Republic, Congo, Nigeria".

"This government has got to take the lead in bringing this to the attention of the world at the development summit in Johannesburg later this year," he told this website.

But the MP's claims have provoked an angry response from the Ghanaian editor of "New Africa" magazine, Baffour Ankomah, who denies there is a criminal trade in bushmeat and dismisses the claim that there is an appetite for gorillas in Britain's African communities.

"It is laughable that that an MP of that calibre will go around making such unfounded claims," Ankomah told ePolitix.

"I come from Ghana myself, bushmeat is part and parcel of our lives. We who have travelled outside, it is still is in our blood - it is like telling a British person who has moved to Ghana don't eat in anymore potatoes.

"We have recognised shops that sell bushmeat, it is not supplied by any criminal gangs. In any case in Ghana we don't have gorillas, we don't eat gorilla meat, that is a lie."

The campaign is backed by IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare), Zoological Society of London, Ape Alliance, European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, Fauna and Flora International, Federation of Zoological Gardens of Great Britain and Ireland and WWF UK.