•  hambantota, sri lanka
• Wednesday, February 16, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Sri Lanka goes into a frenzy this month as it plays co-host to the 2011 Cricket World Cup. Conservationists hope the national pasttime will share national and international media attention with an endangered Sri Lankan resident: the elephant.

After all, the World Cup’s mascot is Stumpy the Blue Elephant, who is likely to find some real life friends as the games go rural, with some of the matches to be played in grounds outside the capital Colombo.

One such city is Hambantota, some 200 km southeast of the capital. Here, the newly built cricket stadium is just one of the region’s large projects, along with a recently opened port. Plans for a new airport, an extended rail track and new highways are under way.

The rapid development in places like Hambantota has left the elephants with a shrinking natural habitat, placing them in conflict with humans. In 2009 alone, more than 220 elephants died in confrontation with humans; 50 people are also estimated to have perished.

The Hambantota stadium stands in the heart of elephant country, and illustrates how development fails to fully account for sustaining the elephant population, says elephant conservationist Manori Gunawardena.

'Development needs to be inclusive of the wild life if it is to survive,' Gunawardena told IPS. 'Relocating elephants into national parks or away from areas of development is not the answer to this question.' Relocations remain suspended after a tusker died while being transported in late 2010.

Gunawardena said plans should be in place to avoid the situation that arose following the massive development programme in Sri Lanka’s central and north-western regions in the 1980s. That programme, prompted by the Mahaweli Development Programme, had left the elephant population stranded in shrinking jungles as new settlements grew around them.

'Mahaweli created a fragmented landscape without space for the animals to move around,' she said. Even three decades after the development programme began, the conflict between humans and elephants continues, often unfolding like a cat-and- mouse game.

In Konweva, a village at the edge of the north-western Kurunegala District some 170 km from the capital Colombo, elephants emerge from the jungle as dusk falls and amble into the fields, crossing the road in front of a military camp. In the village, located where the shrub jungle ends and the paddy fields begin, 50-year-old farmer Immihami Mudiyanse and a young woman named Shanika Ekenayaka kept watch, waiting for the elephants with this IPS correspondent.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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