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A story going round the sites of many websites on Ghana and which has hardly received any mention in the local Ghanaian media is about a Ghanaian culinary delight that unites Ghanaians. Away from the hurl-burly of politics, Ghanaians love their bush mean soup. The favourite of course is �akrantie� (grass cutter) but anything from elephant meat to monkeymeat is fair game! Indeed, bush meat soups in many chop bars attract more patronage and cost more than ordinary domestic meats from goat, sheep or chicken. But what many consumers of bush meat would not have taken note of is what it adds to the country�s GDP. Nana Kofi Adu-Nsiah, executive director of the Wildlife Division of Forestry Commission has confirmed that this Ghanaian appetite for bush meat is also big business. In a startling but not surprising revelation, he has disclosed that Ghanaians consume about 225,287 tonnes of the stuff, worth some 205 million US dollars annually. At a forum in Techiman on the closed season for hunting, covering August 1 to December 1, he said the country�s annual volume of bush meat harvested by hunters was however, 384,992 tonnes worth 350 million US dollars. The forum was organised by the Wildlife Division under the theme, �Ensuring Sustainability of the Bush Meat Trade.� Techiman is a major national trading centre for bush meat. Nana Adu-Nsiah noted that bush meat contributes immensely to the national economy, protein nutrition and household incomes and is considered more important than any other local meat. He said at the endorsement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in September 2000 in New York, participating governments were urged to integrate the principles of Sustainable Development into policies and programmes to reverse the loss of environmental resources including wildlife. The Executive Director, however, said though the Division did not subscribe to a total ban on bush meat production it believed that the principles of the closed season should be understood and observed. Nana Adu-Nsiah noted that Ghana�s forests were home to many endangered species including 34 plants. 17 mammals, 10 birds and five reptiles, stressing that wildlife played a very significant t role in the socio-economic development and served as a source of the nation�s heritage and livelihood. He said grass cutters had been exempted from the close season because research had revealed that the prolific breeder had an excessive population with a possible negative impact on agricultural production. The executive director appealed to the police, traditional authorities and the public to help arrest and prosecute people who game grass cutters without license from the Division and the Forestry Commission. Mr Charles Abaka Haizel, the Brong Ahafo Regional Manager of the Division, said about 5.6 per cent of land in Ghana had been set aside for wildlife conservation and was duly managed by the Division. He said since the adoption of the forest and wildlife policy in 1994, the Division had accelerated the involvement of communities, traditional authorities, the private sector and non-governmental organisations in wildlife conservation. The Mail