Elephant Crop Raids in Selected Parishes in Nwoya District and its Impact on Household Livelihood, Food Security, and Wildlife Conservation

Type Thesis or Dissertation - Bachelor
Title Elephant Crop Raids in Selected Parishes in Nwoya District and its Impact on Household Livelihood, Food Security, and Wildlife Conservation
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2014
URL http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alfred_Kinyera2/publication/271202760_Elephant_Crop_Raids_in_sel​ected_parishes_in_Nwoya_District_Uganda/links/54c0fefe0cf28eae4a6b6740.pdf
Abstract
In Uganda, farming is the major economic activity, and the communities neighboring the national game parks greatly depend on crop farming as the case in Nwoya District that is neighboring Murchison Falls National Game Park from the Northern side. Crop production is the major source of food to these local communities. Besides providing food, they also acts as a source of income derived from selling these crop products to meet the family financial requirement such as paying school fees, medical requirement, and other basic needs. The loss of crops due to elephant raids means that the local community‘s livelihood, and food security is at stake. This causes change in attitude of the local residents toward wildlife, and increases friction between the local residents and the wildlife, for example Elephants; hence the conflict. However, these elephant that causes the loss are under vulnerable species of wildlife as per IUCN categorization, and therefore need to be conserved. This therefore increases the complexity of the problem. In this study, a multistage random sampling method was used to select 231 survey participants from Pabit and Kal parishes from Purongo and Koch Goma sub-counties respectively. Data collection was carried out using; structured and semi structured questionnaires, key informant interview and focus group discussion. The data collected were analyzed using MS excel 2007and SPSS 16.0. The results showed that in these study parishes, crop raids were reported every night/day and most crop fields were raided twice during the growing season. 89.6% of the surveyed respondents reported crop lost 12 months prior to the study however, the mean number of raids between the two parishes was not significantly different with the incidences of occurrences of crop raids having two peaks occurrences during the year in July and November respectively. Majority of crop fields reported had suffered damage of entire crop fields during raids which were not dependent on the average field sizes of the crop but on the frequency of raids of the crop field. Crop raid had both direct and indirect impacts on the livelihood of the residents and threatened their food security and therefore, majority of the respondents had negative attitude toward elephants.

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