The canteen is not a physical building, but a designated landscape planted intentionally with crops that elephants find irresistible, such as sweet corn, sugarcane and pineapple. Established in areas where the animals naturally move, its core purpose is to guide the herds toward managed feeding zones and keep them away from residential homes and higher-value farmland.
Before these bases were built, Li said, villagers often faced heavy losses. In 2017, her own family planted about 1.3 hectares of corn and rice, only to watch elephants destroy more than half of it. At the time, official compensation stood at a meager 9,000 yuan ($1,345) per hectare, leaving families heavily out of pocket.
To rewrite this dynamic, Nanbanghe began building a government-supported food source base in 2018. Under the program, villagers voluntarily leased their land to forestry authorities, earning a steady land rent of 4,500 yuan per hectare annually, paid in five-year cycles. To further tie local livelihoods to the initiative, villagers were hired to plant and maintain these elephant-friendly crops, earning daily wages of 130 to 150 yuan.
By the time the government-supported program officially concluded in 2023, Pu'er's network of food source bases spanned an impressive 800 hectares across the region.
When the State funding ended in 2023, villagers continued planting corn and other crops favored by elephants, creating scattered, self-organized food-source plots.
Li said practical necessity drove this choice — farmland left idle for several years quickly turns wild and becomes exceptionally difficult to recultivate. Equally important, government compensation standards had improved dramatically in the interim.
