DAMBULLA, Sri Lanka –- On a break, farmer Gunasinghe Kapuga draws on a cigarette and describes relations between farmers and elephants that raid their fields in the central Sri Lankan district of Matale: "Obviously, it's war."
He's referring to increasingly deadly encounters between farmers and pachyderms.
Now Kapuga fears that the latest Mideast war will intensify that conflict — because the war is pushing up the price of fuel and fertilizer, so farmers are spending more to plant less. And he believes that means farmers will be more vigilant in attacking elephants who raid their fields: "More elephants will die or more farmers will die."
Already, the stakes are high. Kapuga nods to men digging mud out of shin-deep water, preparing the paddy fields for planting rice. The other day, an elephant wandered onto this very field. Kapuga points to a young man: "He fearlessly chased the elephant away, he ran after it with a flashing torch and threw firecrackers at it," he says. "Some elephants turn around — and attack. It's a really dangerous task."
Sometimes, those elephants kill farmers. And farmers kill elephants by gunshot, electrocution and jaw bombs — explosives hidden in food that shatter an elephant's jaws so the animal starves to death. Killing elephants is illegal in Sri Lanka, and yet not only is it happening, but the methods suggest desperation, says Devaka Weerakoon, a zoology professor at Colombo University. "These are very inhumane ways of killing," he says. But "our farmers are not resilient. Two failed crops means they are completely busted."
These encounters represent an increasingly sour chapter in human-elephant relations in Sri Lanka — an island where these animals have long been revered by Buddhist and Hindu communities. Most of the island's 7,400 Asian elephants live freely, near farms and settlements that are home to some 22 million people.
The data illustrates the severity of this burgeoning crisis. Sri Lanka's wildlife conservation authority shows an escalation from 255 elephants killed in 2011 to 488 killed in 2023. Elephant attacks on farmers have more than doubled: from 60 in 2011 to 188 in 2023.
What's driving the conflict?
One reason for the trend is the changing nature of farming in Sri Lanka.
Traditionally, farmers have relied on rainy season precipitation to water their crops. They'd plant once a year — and say it was relatively easy to chase elephants away. The land would then lie fallow until the next rainy season so elephants could graze without threatening the farmers' livelihood.
Over the past few decades, improved irrigation methods have enabled farmers to cultivate multiple crops a year on the same plot of land. Those farmed crops are attractive to elephants, say experts, because they're tastier and more nutritious than what they'd consume elsewhere.
The elephants raid the fields — and the farmers retaliate. "It's sort of an arms race," says Prithiviraj Fernando, chairman of the Sri Lanka-based Center for Conservation and Research, and an elephant expert. The elephants, he says, adapt to the firecrackers and torches brandished by farmers. Finally, he says, you end up with farmers "shooting the elephants."
The government has long deployed "elephant drives" as a solution — using fire crackers, gunfire and drones to corral elephants and drive them into national parks, which are surrounded by electric fences to keep the animals penned in and away from farmlands.
But elephants learn pretty quickly which parts of a fence won't shock them — like the wooden posts that keep the fence wires up. And they're motivated to escape, experts and government officials acknowledge, because there's not enough food in the forests. "They are coming toward villages, because inside forest areas, the elephant density [is] already saturated," says Manjula Amararathna, a senior director at Sri Lanka's department of wildlife conservation.
Sleepless elephant nights
As tensions continue to rise, farmer Gaamini Disanaayake, who lives near the village of Bambaragahawatte in central Sri Lanka, says fear of elephants is keeping him awake at night.
Literally.
Disanaayake says the previous evening, he encountered an elephant in his field, hurled some firecrackers and it went away. He'd spotted the elephant from a rickety treehouse of rough nailed planks some 12 feet off the ground.
He sentries here through the night. Thousands of other farmers perch in variations of these treehouses, which dot the landscape of central Sri Lanka.
Disanaayake says elephant raids are just one hardship for the island's farmers. They've struggled through back-to-back-crises — including a sudden government ban on fertilizers to prevent hard currency from being spent abroad at a time when it risked defaulting on its debts. It was reversed after an outcry as the ban collapsed crop yields. Shortly afterward, fuel prices surged as the country defaulted on its debts. Then last year, a cyclone smashed through fields just after planting began.
"When those crises happened we had money and enough food to eat," says Disanaayake. But then came the Mideast war. "We are in such a desperate situation," he says.
Although fighting largely subsided weeks ago, the Strait of Hormuz, remains blocked. Sri Lanka is heavily reliant on fuel and fertilizer that was shipped through the strait.
The price of a bag of fertilizer has more than doubled in Disanaayake's area, from the equivalent of $15 dollars, to $37 dollars.
Disanaayake says he borrowed money to buy enough fertilizer for his mung bean crop — then bean prices collapsed as the market flooded with produce.
He echoes what farmer Kapuga says — that the Mideast war will make farmers more desperate to keep elephants away from their diminished supply of crops.
But he sympathizes with the elephants' dilemma: "Elephants don't have anything to eat in the forest, and that's why they are coming here. We feel sorry for them."
The problem is, he says, "we also don't have any other way to feed our children. This is a conflict with two victims."
The rain and wind pick up. The tin sheets of the treehouse roof flap wildly.
The next day, Dissanayake tells us that the winds ripped off the treehouse roof. So he had to sleep at home. He returned to his field at dawn to find that elephants had trampled his mung bean crops.
Near his field, he shows us the electric fence that marks the boundary of a national park. An elephant's muddy footprint is on a wooden pole of the fence, pushed to the ground. Dissanayake quickly gathers palm leaves he has woven together and begins repairing his treehouse roof.
"It's a huge, huge, difficult task to manage this issue," says Amararathna, the senior director at Sri Lanka's department of wildlife conservation. He says they're deploying methods that conservationists champion, like creating a new category of national park where farmers can practice traditional methods of growing crops only during rainy season, which allows elephants to graze on fallow land for months after a harvest. Critics say the government is still also deploying methods that they argue are counterproductive, like those elephant drives.
Back in Bambaragahawatte, farmer Gamini Disanaayake has returned to his field with his wife. He's trying another way to keep elephants at bay: They're making an offering to the divine to protect their field — rice boiled in sweetened coconut milk that was consecrated to the Buddha before planting began. It's wrapped up in a leaf alongside a sweet banana. It's for King Mahasin, a demigod worshipped through the valleys and forests in this area.
"I'm praying to protect my field, my life," Disanaayake smiles, "and the elephant, that he too, won't be harmed."
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