Representatives from 23 so-called "great ape range states" and wildlife experts will gather in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from September 5 to 9 to consider a raft of proposals for ensuring the survival of the primates.

Pressure from disease, war, deforestation and the bushmeat trade, have pushed the "great apes" -- highland and lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos (pygmy chimps) in Africa and orangutans in southeast Asia -- to the verge of annihilation with experts predicting their complete demise by 2055 without speedy action.

"There is a high risk of extinction for all great ape species either in the immediate future or, at best, within 50 years, due largely to threats from human activities," says a draft declaration to be adopted at the conference.

Next week's Kinshasa meeting will be the first at governmental level of the UN-backed Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP), an ambitious scheme launched in Paris in 2003 to sustain and begin to boost their dwindling populations by 2010.

"The urgency of the situation clearly demands a higher level of action," GRASP experts said in a report issued at the Paris meeting. "It is already too late in many areas where great apes are now extinct.

"If we cannot generate a radical increase in the effectiveness of efforts to protect great apes and their habitats, it will be too late for many more populations of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans," it said.

For example, trophy and bushmeat hunters along with deforestation and war have reduced the global population of mountain or highland gorillas in the wild to only 700 in Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC, which has the world's last remaining sanctuary for gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.

Chimpanzees in west and central Africa are routinely hunted for food or trapped for the illegal wildlife trade despite prohibitions in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) treaty.

With only about 100 key great ape populations left in the wild, surveys of 24 allegedly protected preserves in equatorial Africa and Southeast Asia have found populations declining in 96 percent of the areas, according to GRASP.

In Africa, 70 percent of great ape habitats have been negatively affected by some sort of human encroachment, a figure that falls by only six percent for orangutan habitats in Malaysia and Indonesia, according to the surveys.

Extrapolating from annual estimates in the loss of habitat, GRASP predicts that within 25 years less than ten percent of great ape habitat in Africa will be undisturbed and less than one percent in southeast Asia.

Faced with such dire indications, participants at the EU-sponsored meeting in Kinshasa will be asked to commit their governments to strengthening existing laws to protect great apes and boosting enforcement within the next five years.

In addition, developing range states are to take steps to increase the size of reserves with an eye on promoting responsible ecotourism to assist local and national economies by 2010, according to the draft declaration.

GRASP member states include: Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, the DRC, Indonesia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

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