This document addresses the hunting of tropical forest wildlife for food (known as "bushmeat", "wild-meat", and/or "game meat"; see 1.2 for the definition). It was prepared for the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) under the coordination of CIFOR and in collaboration with the Liaison Group on Non-timber Forest Resources, convened in response to paragraph 42 of decision VI/22 of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD and its annex, the expanded programme of work on forest biological diversity, on the basis of goal 4, objective 2, activity (a) of programme element 11. Hunting for food in tropical forests is an issue of concern for primarily three reasons: - There is strong evidence illustrating that the scale of hunting, occurring in these regions, poses a real threat to many tropical forest species; - The depletion of wildlife is intimately linked to the food security and livelihood of numerous tropical forest-region inhabitants as many of these forest-dwelling or forest-dependent people have few alternative sources of protein and income; - The so-called "bushmeat crisis" is the focus of many conservation organizations and of a number of development programmes throughout the tropics. However many of the ways in which hunting and wildlife trade operate, as well as their links to livelihood or ecosystem function, are either poorly understood or not properly taken into account.