African forest hornbills gain new protections from unsustainable trade

By Spoorthy Raman

5 December, 2025

This article was originally published at MONGABAY

Negotiators discussing wildlife trade rules have agreed overwhelmingly to back a proposal that regulates the currently unrestricted trade in all seven species of African forest hornbills.

Eight West and Central African countries had tabled the proposal at the ongoing summit of CITES, the global wildlife trade convention, taking place in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It calls for listing the seven species, from the genera Ceratogymna and Bycanistes, in CITES Appendix II, which would allow the commercial international trade in the species, but under stringent oversight, including import and export permit requirements. No country objected to the proposal, and it was accepted by consensus.

“This decision will go a long way in providing urgently needed protections to keep African hornbills where they belong, wild in African ecosystems, rather than in markets for wildlife trade,” Nico Arcilla, president and research director at the International Bird Conservation Partnership (IBCP), told Mongabay in a text message.

There are 32 known species of African hornbills, none of them previously listed on CITES, and most of which inhabit grasslands and savannas. The seven newly listed ones, including the black-casqued hornbill (Ceratogymna atrata) and the white-thighed hornbill (Bycanistes albotibialis), are forest-dwelling birds, concentrated in West and Central Africa. Over the last two decades, hunting of these African forest hornbills for the international trade has become a growing concern. Additional pressure from deforestation and habitat degradation has pushed populations of these birds to historic lows in Togo, Ghana and Nigeria.

Research shows an average of 100 African hornbills entered the U.S. each year between 1999 and 2024 for their dried heads with intact casques, the large bump over their bills. In that time, demand has increased by around 3% annually, with East African birds dominating the trade from 1999-2004, and the trend shifting to Central African hornbills thereafter. Since 2021, most parts have come from Central Africa, primarily Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“For two genus of African forest hornbills, being listed in Appendix II brings stronger international control on trade,” Cameroonian conservationist Anya Dabite, who studies the hornbill trade, told Mongabay by text message. “Countries will now have to monitor exports more carefully and make sure any trade is legal and not harming wild populations.”

During deliberations at the CITES meeting, delegates from the European Union and countries without wild hornbill populations, including Japan, Brazil, Singapore and the U.S., expressed their support for the proposal, citing the harms of unsustainable trade on these long-lived birds.

Lucy Kemp, Africa chair for the Hornbill Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay by text message that much work remains to understand the supply and demand for hornbill parts.

“We know this is just the starting point and we all have much work to do,” she said. “Now the world is aware that our hornbills are in peril.”

Banner image: A pair of black-casqued hornbills in Gabon. Image by Lionel CASSET via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).