For communities living around Kenya’s famous Amboseli ecosystem — a vast wildlife landscape in the country’s south near the border with Tanzania — elephants are both a source of pride and a growing challenge.
The animals are central to the area’s globally renowned wildlife and support livelihoods through tourism and conservation-related opportunities. But as farms and settlements increasingly overlap with the elephants’ traditional movement routes, their frequent raids on crops can leave farmers counting losses from months of work, deepening the struggle to coexist in a landscape shared by people and wildlife.
The deaths of 18 elephants between late June and August in the Amboseli ecosystem, and the arrest of four people as investigations continue, have brought renewed attention to that delicate relationship, raising broader questions about how communities and wildlife can coexist as pressure on land and resources grows.
Preliminary laboratory results pointed to the probable involvement of a toxic substance in the deaths, with earlier indications suggesting possible cyanide poisoning after the elephants consumed pesticide-contaminated tomatoes. The findings remain under investigation, and authorities have cautioned against assigning responsibility before the inquiry is complete.
For Coleman Sankale, a farmer in Namelok, Kajiado County, who lives just a few meters from the Amboseli National Park, the conflict is part of everyday life. He said elephants and other wildlife regularly destroy crops, leaving farmers to spend nights trying to chase the animals away.
“We don’t want those elephants to come and destroy our farms, our crops,” Sankale said. “We can tell KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) to take care of the wildlife and see how they can keep them far from our farms.”
But Sankale said he does not want the elephants killed. Instead, he called for stronger measures to protect farms, including better maintenance of electric fences and compensation for farmers whose crops are destroyed.
“If they compensate, it is OK. We can live together with animals,” he said, adding that maintaining electric fences would help prevent elephants from reaching farms.
For other farmers, the losses have forced them to abandon crops altogether. Lorinya Oletunge, a small-scale farmer in the Kimana area, located near Amboseli National Park, said elephants have repeatedly entered his farm, destroying bananas, melons and other crops.
“The elephants have come to my farm so many times, almost all the time,” he said. He recalled planting bananas, only to watch the animals destroy them. “I stopped planting them again because when an elephant smells edible food such as banana stalks or watermelon, they will come and eat,” he said. “They have finished my farm.”
The conflict, he said, can extend beyond crops. Elephants sometimes remain near farms through the night and can disrupt the movement of children going to school.
Despite the losses, Oletunge said communities in the area do not support killing elephants. “We are used to coexisting with wild animals, especially elephants,” he said. “We are saying people should not kill elephants because we get sponsorship, bursaries and even jobs for our children in the community from the conservation of those wild animals.”
His experience reflects the complex relationship between communities and wildlife in Amboseli, where conservation brings economic opportunities but also imposes costs on people living close to the animals.
According to the KWS, human-elephant conflict is increasingly becoming a landscape-management challenge rather than simply a question of elephants leaving protected areas.
Elephants regularly move across community and agricultural land along traditional routes, but expanding settlements, farms and fences have increasingly fragmented wildlife corridors. Drought, competition for water and forage, and the availability of crops can further draw elephants into areas where people live and farm.
Growing overlap
The problem, KWS said, is not simply one of elephants leaving protected areas. “Human-elephant conflict is increasingly a landscape-management issue,” said Duncan Juma Wanyama, senior assistant director for corporate communication at KWS, pointing to shrinking and fragmented wildlife habitats and the growing overlap between elephant movements and human livelihoods.
He said the challenge is particularly pronounced in Amboseli because the national park forms the core of a much larger ecosystem where wildlife moves across community and privately-owned land.
Nathan Gatundu, the deputy park warden at Amboseli National Park, said conflicts tend to increase during dry periods, when competition for resources intensifies. He said changing land use and a growing human population were among the main factors behind the increasing conflict.
“People need land for settlement and utilization,” Gatundu said. “This area historically has been a pastoralist area, but people are adopting more settled lifestyles, hence the introduction of settled agriculture and homesteads in areas which previously used to be wildlife corridors.”
Gatundu said the wider ecosystem has more than 2,100 elephants, while about 700 are regular residents of the park. Amboseli National Park covers about 39,200 hectares, compared with a wider ecosystem spanning more than 500,000 hectares.
Elephants move through those areas according to the seasons, he said. The expansion of borehole technology has also made farming possible in areas where cultivation was previously difficult, creating new points of conflict when elephants encounter crops along traditional routes.
“If an elephant this year happens to pass by your property and finds edible food, definitely it is going to be tempted to raid your farm,” he said.
The KWS and local communities have adopted several measures to reduce such encounters, including wildlife barriers, rapid-response teams and water troughs for wildlife.
Farmers are also being encouraged to grow crops that are less attractive to elephants, including chilies, while beekeeping is being promoted as another deterrent. “Elephants are not friends with bees,” Gatundu said.
The longer-term solution, however, may depend on reducing the pressure that brings people and wildlife into conflict in the first place.
For Amboseli, the KWS said the goal should be to move from a predominantly reactive approach to one focused on prevention and coexistence through better land-use planning, protection of wildlife corridors, community participation and early-warning systems.
The recent elephant deaths have added urgency to those efforts. During the investigation into the cause of the deaths, authorities have seized assorted substances, including chemicals. The investigation is ongoing. The KWS, however, has cautioned it would be premature to establish criminal responsibility or link the deaths directly to farmers or the wider human-wildlife conflict.
Still, the incident has highlighted the risks that emerge when frustration over repeated crop losses and economic hardship is allowed to grow. “Conservation cannot be sustainable where communities living alongside wildlife bear a disproportionate share of the costs,” Wanyama said.
sharon@chinadailyafrica.com
