Battle Lines Forming in Nigeria as Residents and Animals Compete for Space and Resources

Elephants graze in the Loango National Park, Gabon, on March 15, 2022. Steeve Jordan/AFP via Getty Images

At 6 a.m. every day, 55-year-old Sunday Abang hops on a motorcycle at his house in Boki, a farming community in Cross River state in southeast Nigeria.

It takes him at least two hours to reach his destination, his cocoa farm, where he spends most of his day carefully cutting down pods and collecting them in baskets.

This was his typical day until one Monday morning in March, when he arrived at his farm and found his crops damaged by wildlife.

“What I saw made me weak,” he said. “The animals destroyed everything in my farm.”

A Cross River gorilla, a distinct subspecies of which fewer than 300 still exist. Courtesy of WCS Nigeria

Abang, just like every other farmer in Boki, relies on farming to meet his family’s daily needs and pay for the education of his children. Now that his livelihood has been destroyed, meeting those needs is his greatest concern.

“We don’t have food, and some of my children schooling outside [the community] have returned home because there is no money [to pay their fees]. We are dying in silence,” the father of 11 told The Epoch Times.

The Cross River gorilla is the most threatened ape species in Africa, with a population of fewer than 300 surviving individuals.

Cross River state is also home to several other endangered primate species, including the Nigerian–Cameroonian chimpanzee and the drill, as well as forest elephants, forest buffalos, duikers, and birds including the grey-necked rockfowl. All these are found in Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, Mbe Mountain Community Sanctuary, and the Okwangwo division of Cross River National Park in Nigeria, and in protected areas in neighboring Cameroon.

In search of food, these creatures come out of their natural habitats and raid crops cultivated by local farmers. And elephants also destroy farmlands each time they are migrating from the Mbe Mountain to Takamanda Forest Reserve in neighboring Cameroon.

Environmentalists blame these encounters, which global agencies term as “human–wildlife conflicts,” primarily on the expansion of farmlands near the protected areas.

A herd of African elephants drinking at a waterhole, in this stock photo. Shutterstock

The conflict, which occurs mostly in regions where rural communities border protected areas, often leads to people killing animals in self-defense, or as preemptive or retaliatory killings, which can drive species to extinction, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Before now, wildlife’s natural habitats used to be miles away from people’s residences, says Peter Bette, a Boki-based environmentalist.

But things have changed, now that agriculture, which is an important part of rural people’s livelihood, is making people encroach into the natural habitat.

The encounters are increasing as both humans and wildlife compete for space and resources, making more conflict inevitable.

“We have moved closer to their habitat because of human activities, especially as farms are expanding. Their habitats have been tampered with, [and] they are competing with human beings,” Bette, team leader of Biakwan Light Green Initiative, a local nongovernmental organization promoting primary environmental care and natural resource conservation, told The Epoch Times.

Samuel Odunlami, a senior lecturer at the University of Port Harcourt’s Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management, agrees. “We are very close to where they normally get their food. Where they live and go about their natural activities have been reduced,” he said.

A Global Concern

Globally, conflict-related killing affects more than 75 percent of the world’s wild cat species, as well as many other terrestrial and marine carnivore species such as polar bears and Mediterranean monk seals, and large herbivores such as elephants, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and UNEP.

The report, “A Future for All: The Need for Human-Wildlife Coexistence,” notes that human–wildlife conflict is escalating around the world, on land and under water. One of the direct impacts of this conflict is a loss in annual yields, which in turn affects the income of local farmers.

A 2011 study that assessed the human–wildlife conflict in Filinga Range of Gashaka Gumti National Park, Nigeria’s largest reserve, revealed that out of 853 bags’ worth of crops (about 93,800 pounds) expected from a planting season, 379 bags, or 44 percent, were destroyed by primates—mainly tantalus monkeys and baboons.

This affects the long-term financial health of farmers, especially as they sometimes borrow money to farm.

“So farming is like [an] investment, [but] because animals are looking for food, they destroy it. Harvest is always poor, so farmers don’t get returns from their investment,” Odunlami told The Epoch Times.

Angela Abang cultivates taro and banana. She’s one of those farmers in Boki complaining of poor harvest since the wild animals raided her crops.

Until April 2022, she cut bananas from her farm every two weeks to sell. One banana bunch earned 800 Nigerian nairas ($1.73). Sometimes, she cut 18 bunches or more.

“For now, I am at home doing nothing. If I see someone to give me a job, I will accept,” the 41-year-old mother of two said.

Just like Angela Abang, Sunday Abang always had a bountiful harvest, sometimes up to 30 bags or more, with each bag fetching $119.43.

Experts are concerned that the increasing invasion of farmlands by wildlife will eventually result in retaliation, a major threat to conservation given that the conflict exposes the wildlife, most of which are endangered, to extinction.

A Sri Lankan elephant roams inside the Yala National Park in Yala on Aug. 22, 2022. Ishara Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images

In 2019, 121 people were killed by wild elephants in Sri Lanka. In the same year, 405 elephants were also killed in the country due to human–wildlife conflict.

In Indonesia, 292 crocodiles were killed in 2018 by villagers in the country’s West Papua Province. The killings were an act of reprisal for a local farmer who was killed while harvesting grasses for his cattle in a crocodile sanctuary.

The conflict is also increasing in Africa. Between 1990 and 2007, lions attacked more than 1,000 people in Tanzania—home of the world’s largest lion population—and humans have retaliated at different times.

In 2020, 90 people in Kenya were killed by wild animals, and in retaliation, seven elephants were killed by the local community.

Last year, local farmers from Cameroonian border villages killed wildlife from Nigeria’s Gashaka-Gumti National Park, according to a local report. The wildlife was said to cross the Cameroon border to eat farm crops.

In 2018, local hunters killed one elephant said to have invaded the farmlands of residents in Idanre, a community in Nigeria’s Ondo State.

At that time, Ojo Adaralode, president of the hunters association in the area, said the killing of the elephant from the thick forest was “to save the lives and properties of the people living in communities.”

In Boki, where both Sunday and Angela Abang are based, Bette said one elephant was killed in 2015. But because of the strong conservation awareness and indigenous by-laws that prohibit killing and eating of animals, some of the farmers involved in killing the elephant were ostracized and some people’s properties were destroyed.

But as the demand for space and resources continues to be on the rise, Odunlami believes that Boki residents might one day retaliate if there are no measures to enable the people to live harmoniously with the wildlife.

“National parks have laws and regulations, so ordinarily, there should be no killings of animals,” he said. “Animals move primarily to look for food and shelter. As they damage crops, the people might retaliate.”

Push for a Solution

The WWF–UNEP report states that there are practical solutions that will encourage coexistence between humans and wildlife.

Some solutions, Odunlami said, include compensating farmers for livestock or crop losses, installing fencing, and using sensory deterrents, such as shouting and beating objects, to ward off wildlife.

Odunlami said Nigeria can adopt some of these solutions that are already working in other countries, such as in Kenya, where deterrents such as seismic vibrations are used to frighten and keep elephants away from farms.

“There is a need to also educate the people who are living very close to the habitat and inform them about the consequences of moving close to the habitat,” Odunlami said.

Another approach, suggests Bette, is bee farming. “No matter how strong the animals are, when bees surround them, they will run,” he said.

Another method is planting pepper plants, as the odor can keep animals away, he said.

Both Sunday and Angela Abang believe that the government plays a critical role in ensuring these solutions are provided. But because the people barely get the government’s attention on conservation issues, they are concerned that solutions might not come their way any time soon.

“There is no good leader in Cross River state who is giving a helping hand to farmers,” said Sunday Abang, who’s making efforts to return to his farm to start over.

“I have told my [workers] we should go there and start making noise to chase the animals away.”