Officials in southwest China's Yunnan Province are building "dinner halls"
for wild elephants in the hope they'll stop devouring crops and
attacking local villagers who live on the border of nature reserves
in Xishuangbanna.
So far about 70 hectares of bananas and sugarcane have been
planted on spare land several kilometers away from the villages.
The idea is the 300 wild elephants in the area will eat these crops
and leave the villagers' acreages alone.
"We've planted the crops on land that no one is using. It's near
the river where the elephants like to wallow and play," says Li
Zhiyong, head of the Wild Animal Protection Office of the
Xishuangbanna Forestry Bureau.
Li hopes the elephants will become accustomed to dining out on
the nearby easy pickings and stop straying into local
communities
So far the experiment has had mixed results but local villagers
are happy something is being done to stop the elephants from
stomping down their crops and attacking them. "We're willing to
help feed the elephants if it stops them from harassing us," says
Wang Qiongxian, who lost a quarter of her crop to elephants last
year.
Last year wild elephants spoiled crops belonging to 12,000
households in 578 villages in the area. Twenty villagers were
attacked and three were killed.
In April, the Yunnan provincial government allocated 4 million
yuan (US$500,000) to Xishuangbanna to compensate farmers for damage
caused by wild elephants, 20 times more than what was budgeted last
year, said Li.
While the people belonging to the Dai minority in the region
consider the elephant to be sacred they face a conundrum: how to
avoid destruction and injury while allowing the world's largest
land mammals to flourish.
In the 1980's there were only 80 wild elephants in the region
but conservation measures have helped their numbers almost
quadruple. There are seven nature reserves in Xishuangbanna
occupying just over 12 percent of the prefecture.
According to research by the International Fund for Animal
Welfare, Xishuangbanna boasts the last well-preserved band of rain
forest on the Tropic of Cancer.
There are an estimated 50,000 Asian elephants living in the wild
throughout the continent.
(Xinhua News Agency July 1, 2006)