Moving Away from Prescriptive Pachyderm Palliatives: Toward an Integrated Assessment of Farmer-Elephant Conflict in Gabon.

Abstract

Crop‐raiding by elephants poses a large threat to farmers in central Africa, where agricultural self‐sufficiency is already low. Despite overwhelming consensus on the need to reduce crop‐raiding and decades of research invested, efforts have had little success. Such efforts typically involve prescriptive low‐tech protection methods at the level of the individual farm, assuming that rational farmers will adopt such methods once provided required knowledge and skills. However, the implicit assumption, that low‐tech methods are low‐cost, generally only holds if labor costs are not considered.

Labor, especially that of young males, is a limiting factor in Gabonese agriculture. In the fifty years since independence, Gabon’s population has rapidly urbanized, from 14% of the population found in urban centers in 1960, to around 80% in 2003. Emigration to urban centers, primarily for schools and jobs, has left villages increasingly devoid of youth and young adults. The farming residents, at the average age of 52, are thus left with scarce labor resources, bringing to the forefront the issue of labor in farmers’ decision‐making.

I develop a theoretical model to account for labor costs in addition to monetary costs when assessing costs and benefits of farm‐level protection. I test this model empirically with data from observations and interviews with 426 farmers in 36 villages in Gabon. Findings support the hypothesis that Gabonese farmers generally receive a higher net benefit from coping strategies, such as planting extra to compensate losses, than from known protection strategies. Because known protection strategies in Gabon are generally known to be relatively inefficient at keeping elephants out of farms, I then explore how efficient such strategies would need to be to be adoptable by farmers, and how much farmers are willing to pay, in terms of different kinds of costs, for efficient strategies.

I find that farm‐level protection is unlikely to be a fruitful strategy for mitigating farmer‐elephant conflict under the conditions of current agricultural and social systems in Gabon. I conclude with recommendations for an Integrated Assessment to explore alternative strategies and to begin to develop the adaptive institutions and relationships necessary to implement lasting solutions.