Wildlife-Human Conflicts impacting Global Food Security: A challenge and it's Mitigation Strategies.

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The Human population has exceeded the mark of 7.8 billion which is interdependent on natural resources for their sustenance. For our survival we need food and with the advancement of technology and food demand, it requires more agricultural land to satisfy our needs. Global Food Security is the state of having reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food. Today, we are facing the Global Food Security issue which has variable causes and miserable consequences on human health. Wildlife-Human Conflict is one of the causes, which impacts considerable percent of Global Crop Land which leads to economic loss to the farmers.

Forest dwellers have co-existed with wildlife populations since ages. As the land use changed with time it affected the patterns of wildlife habitats. The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. According to the FAO, global agricultural land is increasing with the increasing food demand and it will cross 1.66 billion hectares (4.1×109 acres) in 2050.



Fig. 1. Global Land use for food production


Why wildlife-human conflicts are rising?

The problems lie in our unsustainable practices and methods for land utilization. The agricultural lands are as important as wildlife habitats. The problem elevated when we started grabbing wildlife habitats for agriculture and setting up human habitations. This greeted the problem of human-wildlife conflicts. Wild animals including large mammals as well as small animals devastates crop lands of poor farmers. As mammals need large area for their survival, they dislocate from one habitat to another for food, mating and other activities. But most of the lands are utilized by farmers near wild habitats, they jumped into their farms and destroy their yearly income in one go. The human-wildlife conflicts in case of agricultural land destruction is a global issue. Countries like South Africa, India, Kenya, Cambodia, Sri Lanka such cases are common.



Fig. 2. Wild animals destroying crops

 

They can damage the plants by feeding on plant parts or simply by running over the field and trampling over the crops. Therefore, wild animals may easily cause significant yield losses and provoke additional financial problems. Field crops provide a dependable and readily accessible source of food for primates coping with habitat loss. It has transformed habitats and is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity: of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them

Species causing crop damages range from elephant’s wild birds, monkeys, squirrels, deer, parakeet, wild dogs, foxes, deer, and many others like Nilgai. On average, this damage to crops by wild animals amounts to U$ 961 per hectare. It is much more than an Indian Farmer earns from a hectare annually. Therefore, by these estimates, the damages are spectacular and economically important. A survey of 2500 farms in the UK revealed that deer damaged 69% (n=192) cereal crops. This damage cost £500 per annum per farm. Damages varied with deer density. In the USA too deer damages comprised of crop loss, landscape damages. Nilgai damages along with deer damages are common in India too. We have encountered huge crop damage in Mathura (CIRG) and nearby area by Nilgai visits. Grazing and browsing of Nilgai inflict losses on farms. This is regarded as a mammalian crop threat by the farmers. This behavior of them inflicts ozone injury to the young sapling, so precious for the growth of trees in Indian semi-arid farms.  Elephants induce considerable crop damage risks, shocks and stresses on subsistence farmers at the wildlife-agriculture interface



Fig. 3. Monkeys destroying crops in different parts of India



Mitigation Strategies:

·       In agro-pastural landscapes, Human Animal Conflict needs to be converted into Human Animal Co-Existence. 

·       Maintaining the delicate balance between Wildlife Protection Acts and Crop Protection modules for Vertebrate Pest Management (VPM).

·       Development of location species VPM practices duly attaching practicable timelines for withdrawal mechanism.

·       Creating safe zones for Wildlife as an integral part of agro-pastoral landscapes.

·       Evolving synchronization between wildlife biologists and plant protection specialists for a win-win strategy.

·        Creation of buffer zones in the cropped areas, duly working out economic modalities based on agro-ecological zones of India.

The traditional strategies to manage such situations include fires, banging metals, and fencing. These are the widely used mitigation strategies to combat this issue.


AI as a Wildlife-Human Conflict Solution:

A scalable solution to this challenge requires a low-cost technology to detect wild animals especially elephants and transmit alerts to wildlife managers and communities to prevent conflict situations before they occur. Using new advances in artificial intelligence technology, RESOLVE’s camera system, called WildEyes AI, now enters the field. The small cameras work remotely, hidden in a tree above the reach of elephants, and when the camera’s motion sensor is triggered, it uses computer vision to detect elephants in the frame and transmits those images in near-real time to the cell phones of village guardians. 

Conclusion

Global Food Security Challenge is one the biggest challenge human society facing today, the cause discussed above results into both economic loss and food yield loss to a greater extent. There is an urgent need to address this issue globally as a priority as it is impacting crop fields, farmers live along with global biodiversity population. To combat this challenge, we need to use our land sustainable and it is estimated that to satisfy the global hunger we require 30% of the habitable land but we are encroaching more and more wild land resulting into disturbances among the wild animals. Sustainable land-use and AI as a technology to monitor and management this issue will help in reducing the Human-Wildlife Conflicts Globally.

 

References:

·      https://www.csrwire.com/

 https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/10/3572/htm

·          https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287114221_Wildlife_wild_food_food_security_and_human_society



 

 


Location: India

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