ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-SRI LANKA: GEF Bankrolls Elephant Protection Strategy

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Nov 28 1998 (IPS) - At the turn of this century, as many as 12,000 elephants roamed the length and breadth of Sri Lanka, a tiny Indian Ocean island, but today, only one third that number is surviving in the wild.

Annually at least 100 elephants are slaughtered, mostly by farmers protecting their crops from marauding herds who now confined to the dry central zones are forced to forage for food and sometimes attack people.

Last year, this human-elephant conflict claimed the lives of 40 villagers, while an estimated 130 elephants were killed outside their jungle habitat.

With concern about the survival of elephant populations growing, the government last Thursday unveiled a “long-term management” strategy for the conservation of the magnificent mammal.

The plan was drawn up with the support of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which has set aside 4.2 million dollars for the five-year project.

It aims to strengthen ongoing efforts initiated about two years ago by GEF to assist Sri Lanka in conserving its biological diversity, managing wildlife resources in a sustainable manner and for socio-economic development.

Ajai Desai, a consultant with theFood and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) who prepared the strategy after conducting a comprehensive survey and study, is convinced Sri Lankan elephants are at risk.

“Being a small island poses a major constraint to conservation of elephants. History has shown that large mammals on small islands are the first to become extinct,” according to Desai.

In June this year, a group of 150 experts drawn from elephant- related and other fields of conservation met in Colombo at a national symposium to chart out a protection plan. For two days, the group discussed ways to save the Sri Lankan elephant, which is similar to the Indian elephant.

One of its suggestions regarding the appointment of a permanent task force or privately-funded institution to act as an “elephant watchdog”, is being seriously considered by the government.

Desai, who has experience in many elephant countries of the world, is convinced of the need for a national policy; the necessity of defining a network of protected areas including forest reserves for long-term conservation and the need to gather baseline data on elephants like ecology, behaviour and the human- elephant conflict.

The GEF project, apart from managing the human-elephant conflict, will also involve raising the capacity and the capability of the government’s Department of Wildlife Conservation, responsible for the protection of the island’s flora and fauna resources.

Saving the elephants should be a priority, Desai declares. Their numbers have dwindled in the past two centuries. Records show that some 2,500 elephants from the northwest Mannar region were sent abroad and many more hundreds were domesticated for war, work and religious purposes.

Between 1800 and the 1940s, when hunting became a popular sport, many elephants were shot in their ranges. It was at this time also that the island’s hill areas were being developed for plantations and vast tracts of elephant habitat were cleared.

Desai says that it was only after Sri Lanka’s independence from colonial British rule in 1948 that concern about wild elephants grew, but government conservation policies did not focus on the protection and preservation of elephant habitat.

“While the habitat was reduced and fragmented to a fraction of its original size what remained of the elephant population was left largely intact,” he observes in the report which forms the basis for the GEF strategy.

“Displacement, compression into shrinking habitats, lack of adequate natural resources and increased overlap in land use between man and elephant, all contributed to the increasingly severe human-elephant conflict,” he notes.

Recommending the creation of protected areas as elephant habitats, Desai has suggested that it would be necessary to include forest reserves in Sri Lanka because these are also managed by the Department of Wildlife Conservation.

The strategy of “elephant drives”, translocating herds from conflct regions to protected areas, were not very successful in minimising the elephant-human conflict, he says.

Out of 14 massive elephant drives that were conducted between 1974 and 1996, only two were successful. Most of the elephants which moved into new areas eventually returned to their original habitat, continuing the confrontation with farmers.

According to Desai, the resolution of the human-elephant conflict is central to reducing elephant mortality, because there is no other way to persuade people not to kill elephants who stray into villages.

An optimistic Desai concludes, “Once this (conflict) problem is reduced to a minimum, the desperation to stop elephants at all costs will not be there and people will be much more tolerant to minor crop depredation by elephants.”