Elephants, forest farmers clash in Kenya

MOUNT KENYA, Kenya — Three days after an elephant gored and trampled a farmer to death, game wardens tracked down the huge bull — whom they had nicknamed “Osama” — and fired nine .458-caliber bullets into his hulking frame.

Osama and farmer Martin Kagwe were the latest victims of the spiral of corruption and destruction in the forest that surrounds snowcapped Mount Kenya.

The elephant’s crime was bursting onto one of the farms on the edge of the forest with a half-dozen others to feast on cabbages and corn, and then charging at Mr. Kagwe and other farmers who were trying to drive the animals away from their crops.

Illegal logging, farms spreading into the wilderness and inept, corrupt management have brought wholesale destruction of Mount Kenya’s indigenous forest during the past two decades. The loss of forest has eaten away at the elephants’ traditional habitat and pushed them into conflict with human settlements in the fertile foothills of Africa’s second-highest mountain.

So far this year, rangers of the Kenya Wildlife Service have killed at least eight elephants. Last year they shot two, and farmers killed 11.

Mount Kenya National Forest Reserve covers 850 square miles around the base of the 16,893-foot mountain and is home to 2,000 elephants, as well as buffalo, waterbuck, bushbuck, wild pigs, rhinos, monkeys and other wildlife.

Until three years ago, the reserve was managed by Kenya’s Forest Department, which environmentalists say was deliberately crippled under former President Daniel arap Moi so the forest could be exploited commercially. Mr. Moi became president in 1978, and for the next 20 years swathes of indigenous trees were felled by logging companies, many of them connected to high-powered politicians and their families.

The “shamba” system that was supposed to have farmers plant trees within the forest also became corrupt and ineffective, said Bongo Woodley, the wildlife service’s senior warden for Mount Kenya.

The system, introduced in 1910 by the British colonial administration, allows farmers to cultivate small plots of forestland as long as they plant tree seedlings among their crops. After three years, the farmer is supposed to leave the shamba — a Kiswahili word meaning plot or garden — and allow the trees to take over.

But because the Forest Department managed the system poorly, farmers stayed on and took over large sections of the forest, burning wood for charcoal, growing marijuana and snaring wildlife to sell as meat.

A 1999 wildlife service survey found no seedlings growing on 76 percent of the area under the shamba system, while marijuana plots covered 494 acres.

After a public outcry over the report, the wildlife service took over Kenya’s largest forest in July 2000. Since then, game wardens have arrested 1,200 people for illegal logging, charcoal-making and poaching. All were farmers in the shamba system, Mr. Woodley said.

“You cannot protect wildlife and maintain the shamba system, because we have encroached so much on wildlife that we have made it impossible for them to live in their natural habitat in peace,” said Wangari Maathai, an activist named assistant environment minister in the new government.

Mr. Maathai was appointed by President Mwai Kibaki, who took office Dec. 30 after leading an opposition alliance to a historic election victory that ended the 39-year rule of Mr. Moi’s Kenya African National Union party.

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