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| Wednesday, 11 February 2004 |
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Making Buffer-Zones work by Tharuka Dissanaike The Land Reform Commission is one of this country's strangest institutions. I personally know of a group of civic-minded people who were trying to obtain a patch of land for a home to rehabilitate young girls rescued from domestic servitude and ran up against a brick wall- in the form of the LRC. It took the organization years to pry this piece of land away, that too after using the highest political influence they could muster. But reading last Sunday's newspapers I saw a wholly different side to LRC. The organization has not thought twice about parceling out jungled, now-abandoned plantation land that forms a buffer area around the Sinharaja Rain Forest to friends and contacts of the Minister in charge of lands. In a shameful display of political favouritism, land areas ranging from five to fifty acres have been portioned out of this secondary forest area to businessmen, hoteliers and commercial agriculturists. It took the high offices of the Prime Minister to intervene and stop the land grab. All this happened, mind you, while the boundaries of Sinharaja were being redefined to include much of the second-grade forest around it so that the main rainforest has an adequate buffer to protect it from human impact. During a recent visit to Maduru Oya National Park the importance of good buffer areas was amply demonstrated. From the air, this area must be a spectacular mosaic of thick, dense forest and lush bright-green paddy, with the huge expanse of Maduru Oya reservoir in the center and a network of straight, concrete canals carrying silver ribbons of water to the cultivations. But underneath this incredible beauty lies a truly uneasy co-existance; that of man and beast, of village and jungle. In this case the buffer zone of the National Park consist of humans and their villages. The jungle ends in paddy and villages border the Park boundaries. Night time is awash with the sound of crackers and an occasional gun shot. Farmers try to protect their fields from the elephant and other wildlife. Humans and animals pay the supreme price- all too often. A villager reminisced of times when they would see deer and sambhur by the open grasslands but poaching is rampant in these remote and poor settlements, and deer is no longer bold enough to venture out. The villagers are barred from the borders of the Park, they are not allowed to fish in the ample lakes or collect medicine or food from within the boundaries. As in every National Park, this exclusion creates a certain animosity between the guardians of the forest and the village, which, in some cases enjoyed the bounty of the forest for generation before the fences came. In Maduru Oya there is an additional problem. The Army's large jungle combat training center is located in the heart of the wilderness. A visit to Maduru Oya's small wildlife museum will reveal to any curious outsider the outcome of this choice of location. Rows of elephant skulls- death by automatic gunfire being by far the most common. A tracker from the Wildlife Department said that villagers resent the fact that the Army is allowed to be inside and use weapons within the Park while they are barred from something as simple as catching a korali fish for dinner. Sri Lanka's high population density and the need for land for food crops may not allow for large, impact-absorbing buffer zones where human presence is marginal around existing national parks and conservation areas. But in order to keep the depleting wilderness from fragmenting further traditional conservation methods have to be re-thought. There are lessons to be learnt in the co-existence of man and elephant in the deep south, where the jungles surrounding Yala National Park are regularly used as seasonal chena, but with little bloody conflict. There are lessons for conservationists in the sustainable relationship of old villages and the forest. Excluding people from the biggest resource in their vicinity works only in the extremely short term. Buffer zones should be a model for human-wildlife co-existence, not for the use of big-money businessmen and profiteering hotels but for local, village-level, indigenous initiatives. The two institutions providing guardianship for the forest and wildlife in this country also need to have more teeth, more authority and power to carry out their tasks in the face of constant political meddling, and pressure. In important conservation areas like the Sinharaja, the Forest Department's opinion should not be squashed by an impersonal department like LRC. |
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