In Gabon, Ecotourism Vs. Elephant Poachers

MINKEBE — Seen from the helicopter, the canopy of Minkébé National Park, in northern Gabon, looks like a green carpet that stretches to the horizon. The immobile uniformity is only broken up here and there by the veins of muddy rivers or a flock of birds flying. There’s no road or village here near the Cameroon and Congo borders. 

Minkébé is a miracle of biodiversity that’s been carefully preserved from human attacks. Well, almost.

Down on ground level, at the foot of trees so high they seem to caress the sky, another battle is taking place. A hundred soldiers and forest rangers are hunting down, as best they can in an area of over 2,700 square miles, groups of poachers who, in just the past few years, have already decimated 12,000 of the region's 25,000 elephants. The their ivory is sold for a fortune on the Chinese market.

The war on poachers, as Gabon Air Force Captain Allogo Ovono found out when he arrived a few days ago, is mismatched and uneven. “Logistical issues are huge,” he says. The officer doesn’t even have a radio to communicate with the three small units that settled several days’ walk away from his camp. He also lacks food for his troops and fuel for their canoes. “Or a football and beer for my men,” he adds with no trace of humor.

It took Ovono three days in a dugout canoe, with his men, weapons, luggage and supplies, to reach the camp in Minkébé from the northern city of Mayibout. “We capsized, our fresh food rotted in two days. We got attacked by snakes, bees,” he says. “New troops normally come by helicopter. But everything's broken down.”

Joseph Okouyi, senior ranger at...