Farmers need help: raids on farms by wild animals harm their crops

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limited All rights reserved. Human-animal conflict: Policy must ensure that farmers do not bear the burden of wildlife conservation. Dancing peacocks may charm city folk, but they are a nightmare for farmers. (PTI) Summary As we focus on monsoon variability and price volatility, crop losses due to game poaching are a growing problem for farmers. Compensation schemes exist, but they only cover visible losses and are mired in red tape. Can India design policies that protect both farmers and wildlife? The vagaries of monsoon rains and volatility of market prices are not the only factors that affect farmers’ incomes. Attacks on crops by wild herbivores, a less visible but growing crisis, also contribute. Volatile blackbucks and dancing peacocks may charm city dwellers, but they are a nightmare for farmers. Attacks on humans by carnivores, especially tigers, are newsworthy, but financial losses caused by wild herbivore raids are often underreported. At the Center for Sustainable Development at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, we surveyed more than 1,200 affected farmers across Maharashtra and conducted in-depth interviews with farmers in the Konkan region. We accessed multiple data sources and studied the damage caused by macaques, langurs, blackbucks, chinkaras, Indian gaur, deer, nilgai, sambar, wild boars, giant squirrels, porcupines, elephants, peacocks and parakeets. With this data, we calculated estimates of net farmer income losses in Maharashtra. While earlier studies used visual inspections to estimate crop damage, the losses don’t stop there. Expenses on guarding and fencing and seasonal delays must also be accounted for. Indirect effects, such as specific crops being abandoned or restricted, or the use of suboptimal practices in the face of an impending risk, also contribute to farmer losses. Game raids significantly curtailed traditional household kitchen gardening in the Konkan belt. This forces families to incur additional expenses to buy vegetables. Society also suffers losses. Farm work is a source of income for landless and marginal farmers. When a crop is destroyed in the middle of the season, the income of laborers and other stakeholders is wiped out. We took into account invisible damage and farm protection costs to estimate the net agricultural loss caused by wildlife. Our estimate is that Maharashtra’s farmers lose between ₹ 10,000 crore and ₹ 40,000 crore a year. Crop damage is compensated by the state’s forestry department. However, in the years from 2020 to 2024, it disbursed a total of just ₹ 210 crore. This difference can be attributed to a lack of standard damage assessment procedures, farmer ignorance, complex bureaucratic procedures and the fact that compensation only covers visible damage and not indirect losses. So what farmers receive is a small fraction of the actual loss and does not reveal the extent of the problem. We have studied the Maharashtra government’s resolution on compensation and its protocols. This requires a panchanama (or official statement of facts) in the presence of one official each from the departments of forest, revenue and agriculture. This is neither easy nor time-efficient, as the procedure sets a 14-day timeline for completion. On one hand, there is poor awareness among farmers, especially those who are illiterate, and on the other hand, we have some growers who prefer to stay away from such bureaucratic procedures. State government data between 2020 and 2024 shows that only 48% of claims were accepted and 37% paid. The affected farmers, our study found, were highly dissatisfied with the compensation protocol of the state forestry department. Many have said that such damage is often underestimated; in some cases even the amount recorded on the panchanama was not fully refunded. Among our 1,200 respondents, 24% identified wildlife harvest attacks as the primary reason for their income losses, while 54% reported a stoppage of at least one harvest. Our Konkan estimates indicate that this coastal region’s farmers suffered annual losses of between ₹117,000 and ₹133,000 per hectare due to game poaching. If we include the damage to kitchen gardens, the combined annual losses in Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts are estimated at ₹5,677 crore per year. Studies from across the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve suggest that crop yields at a distance of 5 km from the forest boundary can be double what farmers obtain closer to it. Even with actively guarded farms, wild animals are a major threat. Support-cum-reward experiments by Milind Watve have shown that appropriate incentives can increase agricultural output near protected areas by 2.5 to 4 times. Our survey also shows that crop raids are not just a problem around protected forests. Farmers across the state were affected. For the sake of rewarding farming in India, compensation protocols should be fair and simple, with timely payments. The use of behavioral economic approaches such as support-cum-reward schemes can significantly reduce the work of the forest department. Moreover, we need deeper research into the root causes of herbivore raids to formulate long-term mitigation measures. India is a very diverse country. A clear policy for human-wildlife coexistence and a practical management system are critical for both wildlife conservation and crop security. It is not about putting economics over ecology, but a call for policies that do not impose the costs of conservation on farmers. Our research shows that farmers are willing to participate in the resolution of human-wildlife conflicts. If long-term solutions are found, the forest departments of states will be relieved of the burden of dealing with these problems, leaving them more time for conservation work. We must spare no effort to work out how best to secure Indian farms from raids. The authors are respectively Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune; and retired professor, IISER Pune. Get all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. more topics #AgricultureSector #IndiaFarmCrisis Read next story