The departure from the traditional methods to scare elephants that destroyed crops to chilli fencing and chilli cultivation are helping farmers in Zambia to earn a decent income as well as maintaining their crops. Traditional methods such as making noise by clapping, drumming and shouting and building watch towers or making effigies with noisy flying plastic materials are giving way to the latest method of chilly plantations and fencing.
A sisal rope soaked in mashed chilli that is tied with the poles erected around the farmland is chilli fencing. According to studies, the smell of chilli can cause severe pain to the jumbo’s head, and it is estimated an elephant can devour a hectare of maize in just few hours. Therefore, farming community percieve chilli has a fetish to the otherwise deteriorating agricultural sector.
The chilli plantations in Mfuwe, a small tourist village in the Eastern Province of Zambia, which started with an intention of scaring the elephants, have eventually turn out to be a savior crop to the region. Chilli farmers with the assistance from South Luangwa Conservation Society (SLCS), a local community-based natural resource conservation project is able to convert chilli as the most profitable crop of the region.
According to SLCS, the increasing profits through chilli plantation, on the other hand, has been able to reduce widespread poaching and snaring. The society believes that most of the people are not actually interested in poaching, and they have resorted to such activities in the absence of stable jobs and owing to abject poverty.
People felt the crop has given them a new livelihood, and look up to making good profits in the near future. Thus, once what has been started as a preventive crop has become a major income earner. However, the issue of drying up of crops due to the lack of equipment could be solved by the intervention of the government or others, said a farmer.