13/03/2006 - Sumatra,
Indonesia – WWF is urging Indonesian forestry
service officials in Sumatra's Riau Province
to stop capturing and translocating elephants.
Recent captures in Riau have had a very
high incidence of death — as high as 85
per cent — as many of the endangered Sumatran
elephants die during and immediately after
the capture process. The survivors are likely
to leave the forest they are released in
and start raiding villages surrounding it.
“The death rate of elephants during official
translocation operations is unacceptable
and capturing should be the last resort.
If the elephants are captured, we demand
that an independent observer team be with
the capture team at all times," said
Nazir Foead, director of WWF-Indonesia's
Species Conservation Programme.”
“Unfortunately, the government is focussing
on the symptom – capturing homeless elephants
that come into conflict with people – rather
than dealing with the underlying problem,
which is the uncontrolled conversion of
forests that are home to some of Sumatra’s
last wildlife populations.”
In December 2005, eight elephants were
secretly released by the Riau Forestry Agency
in Tesso Nilo National Park. Within just
four weeks, WWF’s Elephant Flying Squad
filmed them raiding the fields of nearby
Lubuk Kembang Bunga village, the nearest
village from the park.
Currently, a herd of up to 51 elephants
is stranded near Balai Raja village and
has been raiding crops and damaging homes
in the village. The elephants are about
25km away from their home, the Libo forest.
Libo is being illegally logged and converted
at breakneck speed. WWF is calling on the
local government to immediately stop those
activities and organize an operation that
will drive the elephants back to their forest.
“We have been working hard to stop the
conflicts with elephants in our village,
with the help of the flying squad,"
said Radaimon, the leader of Tesso Nilo
Community Forum. "Putting elephants
into our neighbouring forest cannot be accepted.
These elephants will soon attack us. We
are not able to clean up the mess of Balai
Raja’s problem.”
In 2004, NGOs and the Indonesian Ministry
of Forestry developed a human-elephant conflict
mitigation protocol for Riau that would
avoid the kinds of cases that have occurred
in recent weeks. If the protocol had been
in place, it would have taught communities
how to mitigate the conflict without suffering
losses and without the need to capture elephants.
Since 2004, WWF has worked with the communities
surrounding the Tesso Nilo forest — also
on Sumatra — to avoid losses from raiding
elephants. During that time, losses declined
by 80 per cent, no houses have been destroyed
and there have been no loss of human or
elephant lives.
For Tesso Nilo National Park to accommodate
any translocated elephants, the full, 100,000-hectare
proposed area has to be declared a national
park. Since 1992, the Riau Conservation
Office has been calling for an elephant
conservation area to be declared in Tesso
Nilo but so far, only a small, 38,000-hectare
area has been declared a park.
Riau has lost 57 per cent of its forests—-
from 6.4 million hectares to 2.7 million
hectares — over the past 23 years, many
of them through illegal conversion. Riau
has lost half of its elephant population
in the last seven years, with the remaining
population numbering only about 350. Protected
areas for elephants like in Mahato and Balai
Raja have been almost completely cleared
illegally with no action by the local authority
to stop it.
WWF is calling on the government to immediately
stop all forest conversions in Riau.
