Elephant encounters rattle farmers

The damage was the worst Solikin had seen in a decade, he said. The elephants left a trail of destruction that stretched for more than a mile.

The Sepintun farmers have already identified the suspects in the July rampage: two male elephants with a reputation locally for raiding crops.

“The ones who did this carnage are Haris and Lanang,” said Marhoni, an oil palm grower in Sepintun.

In 2017 the Jambi conservation department moved Haris, a male elephant, across the province from Bukit Tigapuluh National Park to Harapan Forest (“Forest of Hope”), a 98,555-hectare (243,535-acre) restoration area in the lowland near Solikin’s oil palms.

Their hope was that Haris would unite with one of the five remaining female elephants in Harapan Forest. A year later, the conservation department doubled down and sent in Lanang, a male in his 30s, to join Haris in Harapan Forest. Anecdotal testimony suggests the government’s conservation tactic has yet to win approval from all local farmers.

More than 70% of Sumatra was forested around the time Indonesia declared its independence in 1945. However, research by WWF-Indonesia indicates that Sumatran elephants have lost around 70% of their habitat in just the last 25 years, as vast tracts of the island were converted for commercially valuable oil palm, pulp and rubber concessions.