UK call for tea plantation pesticide ban to save wildlife

Officials and locals have called for a no-pesticide zone around Kaziranga National Park following the deaths of elephants near tea estates bordering the wildlife sanctuary.

In October, authorities registered a case against Diffloo tea estate after two elephant calves were found dead close to its tea gardens. Meanwhile, two adult elephants also died close to the estate.

Forestry workers claim the elephants ventured beyond the park boundaries to search for food, and ate grass that had been sprayed with toxic pesticides, while other animals such as cows and vultures have also reputedly fallen victim to pesticides.

Anurag Singh, a senior forestry official in the region, told the BBC: "The death of these elephants has brought the pesticide use issue to the limelight, because the chemicals sprayed in tea estates are playing havoc with wildlife in our forests which are surrounded by hundreds of tea estates.

"The managements of these estates must turn to organic farming and stop spraying chemicals."

The Kaziranga national park dates back over 100 years, and is famous for wildlife such as the tiger and the one-horned Indian rhino.

Local community groups and some tea estates have also supported the call for organic farming. Binod Saharia, who owns an organic tea estate which uses cow dung, fish and meat waste as fertiliser, wants all tea estates to go organic for fear of losing "lucrative markets where consumers are very health conscious".

And some planters are wary of the transition to organic being imposed by government.

HS Siddhu, a veteran tea planter in the area, said that the tea industry "is so used to chemicals because they represent the easy option" in combating plant diseases such as helopeltis.

The Assam region which hosts the park is an important tea producing region in India and is home to the world's oldest commercial tea plantations, producing half of India's tea output over 800 estates.

African elephants 'two separate species'

New research suggests that the African savannah elephant and the smaller African forest elephant, long believed to have been a single species, are in fact distinct species of their own.

Experts studied DNA from African savannah elephants, African forest elephants, the extinct American mastodon, and the woolly mammoth. The research found that there are three - as opposed to two - elephant species alive today.

Published in the journal PLoS Biology, the study also shows how Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than to African elephants.
The split between the two species "is almost as old as the split between humans and chimpanzees," Michi Hotfreiter, one of the study's authors, told the FT.

Much less is known about the forest elephants, which are less abundant than their savannah counterparts, and should therefore become "a bigger priority for conservation purposes", according to Alfred Roca, another scientist who worked on the project.

"Since 1950, all African elephants have been conserved as one species," he added.

"We now have to treat the forest and savannah elephants as two different units."

Namibians using vuvuzelas to scare off elephants

The vuvuzela - the plastic horn which came to prominence during the 2010 Fifa World Cup - could become the latest weapon in neutralising human-elephant conflict in Namibia.

A warden of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism in the Omusati region demonstrated its properties in chasing away some elephants using metre-long instrument, which had been lying in the backseat of his car.

After standing still, and then mock-charging, the elephants seemingly could no longer tolerate the signature sound of South African football fans' favourite horn, and ran away.

According to New Era, the local government has now ordered 400 vuvuzelas to find out if they are truly an effective deterrent to the elephants, which often come into conflict with people and destroy their crops.