DAMBULLA, Sri Lanka — On a break from the muddy paddy fields, farmer Gunasinghe Kapuga lights a cigarette and describes the long-running clashes between people and elephants in his district of Matale with a blunt phrase: “It’s war.”
Those words capture how violent and bitter the encounters have become. Farmers who guard their crops at night throw firecrackers and flash torches to chase off raiding elephants. In return, elephants sometimes respond by attacking. When deterrents fail, some farmers have resorted to killing animals by gunshot, electrocution or by hiding explosives in food that shatter an elephant’s jaw and condemn it to a slow, painful death.
The brutality points to desperation, say conservationists. Devaka Weerakoon, a zoology professor at the University of Colombo, calls those methods inhumane but warns that farmers’ livelihoods are fragile: two failed crops can push a family into ruin.
This friction is not new on an island where elephants have been venerated in Buddhist and Hindu tradition, but it is intensifying. Sri Lanka is home to roughly 7,400 Asian elephants that roam near towns and farms in a country of about 22 million people. Over the last decade the toll has climbed: official data from the wildlife conservation authority show elephant deaths rising from 255 in 2011 to 488 in 2023, while attacks on farmers rose from 60 to 188 over the same period.
Why the spike?
Land-use change and evolving agriculture are central. Where farmers once planted only with the rainy season and left land fallow for elephants to graze, expanded irrigation now allows multiple crops per year. Those cultivated fields produce tastier, more nutritious food than the remaining forest forage, and elephants are drawn to them.
“It’s sort of an arms race,” says Prithiviraj Fernando, chairman of the Center for Conservation and Research. Elephants can adapt to scare tactics like firecrackers and torches, and when those measures stop working, confrontations escalate to shooting.
The government has long tried “elephant drives” to herd animals into parks using noise, pyrotechnics, occasional gunfire and even drones. Parks are ringed with electric fences, but elephants also adapt: they figure out how to topple wooden fence posts so wires lie flat and step over them. Officials acknowledge part of the problem is that national parks cannot support growing elephant populations. “They are coming toward villages because inside forest areas the elephant density is already saturated,” says Manjula Amararathna, a senior director at the Department of Wildlife Conservation.
Hunger and economic strain compound the conflict. Farmers here have endured a string of shocks: a sudden government ban on chemical fertilizers that was later reversed but damaged yields; a sovereign debt crisis that pushed up fuel prices; and destructive weather events. Most recently, war in the Middle East disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, helping drive fertilizer and fuel costs higher. In parts of Matale a bag of fertilizer that once cost the equivalent of about $15 now sells for roughly $37.
Higher input costs and lower returns mean farmers are planting less, borrowing more and taking greater risks to protect what they have. Kapuga worries the result will be more deadly confrontations. “More elephants will die or more farmers will die,” he says.
Farmers cope with limited tools. Many build rickety treehouses 10 to 15 feet above fields and keep sentry overnight. They patrol with flashlights and strings of firecrackers, hoping to scare elephants away before crops are trampled. Gamini Disanaayake, who watches a field near the village of Bambaragahawatte, sleeps in such a treehouse and says he has chased elephants away with noise and light. But storms can ruin these makeshift shelters; when winds tore off his roof one night, he had to sleep at home — and returned at dawn to find his mung bean crop destroyed.
Disanaayake expresses sympathy for the animals even as he defends his own need to protect his family. “Elephants don’t have anything to eat in the forest, and that’s why they are coming here,” he says. “We feel sorry for them. But we also don’t have any other way to feed our children. This is a conflict with two victims.”
Beyond individual farmers’ tactics, authorities and conservationists are trying other approaches. The wildlife department has proposed a new category of parks that would let farmers practice traditional seasonal farming tied to the rains, leaving land fallow for elephants to graze after harvest. Conservationists favor solutions that restore corridors and abundant forage, reduce human-elephant contact points and invest in nonlethal deterrents.
Critics argue the government still relies too heavily on crowd-control measures that can aggravate elephants and push them into risky behavior. As both people and elephants adapt, the confrontations can become more lethal and more inventive — a sign of how high the stakes are for rural communities.
In small villages across central Sri Lanka, the conflict plays out quietly and relentlessly: nighttime vigils in nail‑together treehouses, frantic repairs at dawn, offerings laid out to local demigods with prayers that neither farmer nor elephant will be harmed. Those rituals underline the human desire to coexist, even as economic hardship, changing landscapes and hungry herds make peaceful coexistence harder to achieve.
Until there are reliable alternatives — more food in protected areas, affordable inputs for farmers, viable compensation or livelihood programs, and effective, humane deterrents — these frontline clashes are likely to continue, with rising costs and diminishing options pushing both sides toward ever riskier responses.