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blackvault
Site Admin
Joined: Sep 10, 2001
Posts: 3660
Location: USA
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 Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2002 2:56 am Post subject: Farmers Keep Elephants at Bay with Chili Peppers |
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African farmers can keep elephants at bay by spicing up their crops, say researchers. Chilies offer crop protection because elephants not only avoid the plant, but also avoid other crops when the chili peppers are burned.
The discovery could offer farmers enormous damage control from elephants with the ability to destroy entire fields over night. In fact, Botswana compensates farmers for elephant damage, and pays out more than $1 million USD every year.
According to a recent report in the journal Nature, many methods have been tried to manage the problem, but most have only been successful to a limited degree. Marksman can\'t even put a dent in the problem due to the sheer number of elephants. Electric fences have proven too costly to install and maintain, and the time-honored methods of fires and drums take up to an hour to work.
\"It\'s been an insoluble problem,\" says Loki Osborn, a conservation biologist on the Mid-Zambezi Elephant Project, based in Harare, Zimbabwe. He and colleague Guy Parker, of the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, are working with farmers and local government in northern Zimbabwe to design and implement low-tech elephant deterrents. The use of noise makers, burning chilies and warning systems such as bells strung on fences have helped decrease elephant damage by three-quarters over the last two years.
The benefit of using chilies is that elephants do not become trained to avoid the peppers. \"It\'s not just an empty threat -- it causes the elephants real short-term pain,\" Parker told the Society for Conservation Biology\'s annual meeting in Canterbury, UK this week.
Though chilies are a good choice of crop because they naturally repel elephants, they are also a profitable crop. Clearly, farmers in Mozambique and Zambia have recognized the profitability of such a crop, because many have switched from cotton to chilies.
Keeping elephants out of the African crops revealed other weaknesses in the agricultural field, Osborn told Nature. \"People still aren\'t really able to harvest anything,\" he explained, because seed stock and cultivation practices are poor.
The Chili Pepper Company, an offshoot of the Mid-Zambezi Elephant Project, is now trying to improve agriculture by teaching improved farming techniques and introducing better varieties of maize. Uganda is taking note of the success with chili peppers. Their common approach to the elephant problem is thorn fences, trenches and stone walls, but elephants eventually find weak spots in those methods and make it through to the fields.
Joel Musaasizi, a conservationist with development organization CARE Danmark, based in Kabale, Uganda intends to try the chili pepper method. He told Nature, \"I\'m going home to try it. I sincerely hope it\'ll help our people.\"
Source: Harvard University; Nature
http://www3.cosmiverse.com/news/science/0702/science07170203.html
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