Elephants Force Myanmar Villagers to Seek Tree-Tops!

Local Editor

Pushed from their forest home by encroaching farm land, wild elephants are driving fearful villagers in a Myanmar township to seek refuge in tree houses while the animals storm their rice paddies looking for food.

The elephants trampled crops, destroyed homes and even killed people in their path, forcing families in Kyat Chuang to build new shelters made of wood and bamboo on higher ground.

Relatively, villagers in Kyat Chaung, a farming community 100 kilometers north of Yangon, told media sources that they yearned for the days before the elephant rampages started three years ago.

As for now, they have to scamper up home-made bamboo ladders to their elevated huts whenever they hear the thundering sound of elephant feet, which is usually several times a week.

Spurred by the loss of their forest habitats, the elephants, and villagers they have been terrorizing, are some of the casualties of Myanmar's alarming rate of deforestation, one of the fastest in the region.

Eventually, the country lost almost 20 percent of its forest cover between 1990 and 2010, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Experts say the chief drivers of forest loss are logging and large-scale land concessions for commercial agriculture handed out under decades of opaque junta rule.

Myanmar's population of wild Asian elephants is thought to be one of the largest in the region, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

But the endangered species is increasingly threatened by habitat loss, a thirst for ivory, and traffickers who smuggle the animals into Thailand for the tourist industry.

For its part, the newly-elected National League for Democracy [NLD] said Thursday it would address Myanmar's medley of environmental issues after assuming office later this year.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team