1. Jumbo Justice?
Mark Hager ยฉ 2015
Sri Lanka may be world capital for human-elephant conflict (HEC). It boasts the highest
elephant density in Asia, trailing only Zimbabwe and Botswana worldwide, and ranks
comparably to those two African nations in elephant/human ratio. Sri Lanka meanwhile harbors
a quick-growing human population, 80% of which still lives off the land. HEC sharpens as
marginal farmers encroach on elephant habitat like forest edges. Hungry and sometimes angry
elephants consume or trample valuable crops, raid stored harvest and destroy dwellings. They
kill some 70 Sri Lankans every year, while enraged Sri Lankans kill some 200 elephants
annually--mostly by gunshot-- from a total population of around 6000. This is depressing in a
land where admiration for elephants has long been a cultural polestar.
For decades, the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) has purported to manage
HEC through a single simple strategy: fence the elephants into reserves and national parks,
separate from human livelihood pursuits. There are two problems.
First, getting most elephants into protected zones is unrealistic. Some 70 % currently live
outside of reserves. New transports to reserves doggedly seek escape. One bull, trucked from his
home in a Hambantota city dump to Yala national park, escaped cleverly and bee-lined fifty
kilometers through paddy field and village back to his dumpy home within days. He happened to
be wearing a tracking device, as scientists watched in wonder. A dozen of his trans-located
companions soon rejoined him in scrounging the dumpโs veggie leftovers.
Second, reserve boundaries do notโand probably could neverโcorrespond with
elephant feeding and socializing ranges. Fences cut family members off from one another-- a
serious if unintended cruelty--plus they crowd protected zones beyond carrying capacity and
restrict access to vegetation elephants need to consume prodigiously on a daily basis in order to
maintain health. Hungry elephants gaze across electric fences at yummy food they cannot reach.
At Yala, elephants have been trending skinny for a decade or so after major fencing, while
evidence suggests rising illness and death among malnourished elderly and young. With the
elderly, this means premature loss of valuable learning. With the young, it means a looming
threat of dwindling populations due to breeding shortfalls: this within a premier and picturesque
elephant โsanctuary.โ
Focus groups with affected farmers reveal that they would feel far less stressed if they
could get compensated for lost crops. It seems unlikely, however, that private insurance can
provide a solution. Farmers in elephant zones face such high risk of loss that premiums charged
would be nearly as high as the losses themselves. Farmers would never buy insurance costing as
much as the losses against which they are insuring. Any compensation system would therefore
have to come from government. Issues surface there too, however. Proper proof of loss requires
tedious investigation: was it really crows who ate the crop, followed by human trampling to
2. finger elephants as the culprits? More, insurance always raises the specter of โmoral hazardโ:
carelessness because losses will be compensated. Insured farmers may fail to take available steps
against jumbo incursion and may even encroach recklessly on habitats.
Having examined the pros and cons of numerous approaches, elephant scientist Dr.
Pruthu Fernando of the Centre for Conservation and Research concludes that the best solution by
far is fences. But he wants to fence elephants out, not in. Electric fences around paddy fields and
villages, he contends, will exclude most depredations at acceptable (though hardly negligible)
cost. Elephants get an unpleasant but non-dangerous shock when they nudge such fences. Fences
can be taken down after harvest, so elephant range is preserved, at least in the off-season.
Elephants thrive on vegetation that sprouts in paddy fields post-harvest.
Community difficulties may lie, however, in deciding how much fencing should be
bought, where it should be sited, who should pay how much for it and who should spend how
much time maintaining it. Fencing has aspects of a โcollective goodโ: everyone benefits once it is
installed and more benefit to one does not mean reduced benefit to others. Classically, collective
goods should be paid for by the entire collective--all benefit so all should share costs--but in this
case some may benefit more than others depending on how much land they own and where, how
much fence protection they get, how much money they are required to chip in and how much
time they are required to spend on maintenance. Sorting out these distributional issues could
paralyze communities into inaction on something clearly beneficial to all.
Distributional issues within elephant-affected communities lose their edge if the cost of
fencing is subsidized from outside, lowering the stakes for everyone directly affected. DWC has
taken some preliminary steps into government-subsidized fencing in select locations. Total
subsidy is unwise because villagers will probably fail to maintain fences that cost them nothing
to install. Of course, government- subsidized fencing on a large scale would impose costs on all
tax-paying Sri Lankans. Why should town-dwellers--not all of them rich--pay to insure the
livelihoods of forest-edge farmers? Because an elephant-filled island is a โcollective good,โ
benefitting all Sri Lankans spiritually, if not materially? How do we judge the truth of that?
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Mark Hager lives in Pelawatte with his Sri
Lankan/American family. Aside from his studies in wildlife and political economy, he consults on
legal and technical writing challenges.
