Farmer’s Perception and Willingness to Pay for Mitigating Man-Animal Conflicts in Coimbatore Forest Circle

Abstract

The study assessed the farmers and other stakeholder’s perception on man-animal conflict at Coimbatore forest circle. Around 37 per cent of the respondents outlined that the farm floor is less than one kilometre distance from the reserve forest. Whereas, 33 per cent of the farm floor was within the distance of one to two kilometres revealed that around 70 per cent of the farm floor is very closer to the forest floor and hence the visit of elephants and other animals to the farm field is quite often taking place. While examining the reason for man-animal conflicts, the same were ranked based on the mean score obtained by using the Likert scaling technique with five point continuum. Among the major reasons, the habitat fragmentation found to be number one stood with the opinion of “strongly agree” according to eighty per cent of the respondents. This was followed by shortage of food resources in the forest perimeter and the periodic human invasion into the forests for their various needs like small timber, fuel wood and bush meat related activities found to be the major reasons for unexpected conflicts between the wild animals and the human being. The same was supported by their respective mean scores of “agree” mode of scale developed for this purpose. The most affected crop is banana which is the one most preferred to the elephants which stood in the first rank and the second rank goes to the coconut, the banana and the coconut were the preferred crop to the elephants. in the absence of the two expressed in the rank one and two, the arecanut and sugarcane could attract the elephants around 32 per cent of the respondents were ready to pay some higher amount which ranges between rs 200 to 500. However, around 17 per cent of the respondents were not interested in paying any contribution towards such initiatives. Among the many protective measures practiced by the farmers, the fire crackers and the powerful torches illuminated on the animal face could alleviate the animals immediately and hence these two protective measures were common among the farmers. Besides, researchers has also used probit regression analysis to analyse the influence of different factors on the dependent variable, willingness to pay. Awareness of the respondents towards mitigation measures, effectiveness of existing mitigating measures, and proximity of farm land to reserved forest, percentage of farm income to household income, farm size and economic loss incurred due crop and property damages by the animals. among the seven variables, awareness of the respondents towards mitigation measures, effectiveness of existing mitigating measures, proximity of farm land to reserved forest, farm size and economic loss incurred due crop and property damage were the six factors found to be statistically significant indicated that these factors cause significant changes in the willingness to pay among the stakeholders.