Introduction
The wildlife trade is a major societal issue challenging both
biodiversity conservation and global health (Bezerra-Santos et al.,
2021; Hughes, 2021). At an estimated annual value of several US$
trillions, it also constitutes a crucial –often parallel– economy for
countries, in which actors of the supply-chain source their revenues
(Andersson et al., 2021). It is also an important food system for a
number of rural households across the tropics (Fa et al., 2016).
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a vivid debate on
whether or not the wildlife trade should be banned. Contrasting calls
from and within the scientific community, the political spheres and the
public have been put forward (Fang et al., 2021), from an outright
permanent ban (Sills et al., 2020) to maintenance of the wildlife trade
for the sake of social development (Roe et al., 2020).
West and central African rainforests are a particular hotspot for the
wildlife trade, where bushmeat –the terrestrial vertebrates
hunted for food– has traditionally been a vital source of protein and
income for rural communities (Ingram et al., 2021). With the
globalization of the trade, bushmeat offtakes have become likely
unsustainable for many species (reaching c. 5 million tons each year;
Nasi et al., 2011), an extinction trend coined under the term “bushmeat
crisis” (Bennett et al., 2002).
With the COVID-19
pandemic, the African continent was struck by national trade bans of
various length and effectiveness (Harvey-Carroll et al., 2022; Meseko et
al., 2020). However, because the bushmeat trade is a poorly regulated,
parallel economy across most of Africa, the genuine economic stakes
behind the trade are poorly known (van Vliet et al., 2017). Moreover,
the impact of bans on trade activities has rarely been quantified (but
see Funk et al., 2022), notably in terms of post-ban recovery.
We conducted long-term monitoring of bushmeat sites in Côte d’Ivoire
(West Africa) that encompassed pre-, during, and post-COVID-19 lockdown.
In Côte d’Ivoire, hunting has been illegal since 1974 (law n°94–442),
but the bushmeat trade is openly tolerated, notably in major urban zones
(Gossé et al., 2022). Quantitative data on the bushmeat trade are scarce
and mostly outdated, but large levels of supply from protected areas has
been observed recently (Bi Gonedelé et al., 2017; Bi Gonedelé et al.,
2022). The trade seems non-selective in terms of species and strictly
motivated by financial income (Gossé et al., 2022), highlighting both
the likely unsustainability and important economic role of the national
bushmeat trade network.
Controls of the bushmeat trade by Ivorian state agencies have been
regularly implemented as conservation-oriented measures or public health
emergencies after the earlier epidemic of Ebola virus disease in 1994
(Dindé et al., 2017). However, there is to date no information available
on how such control measures have affected the market. Our main
objective was to assess the dynamics of the bushmeat trade in Côte
d’Ivoire as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and explore
post-lockdown recovery trends depending on market type. We posit that
(i) bushmeat trade dynamics was negatively impacted by governmental
measures, with trends being similar between market types (as a measure
of the effectiveness of government interventions), and that (ii)
bushmeat trade activities quickly recovered after the lockdown –and the
bushmeat ban– were lifted (as a measure of market network resilience).