Dr Nancy Priston

I finally managed to sit down with the farmer who poisoned the Kawelli troop of monkeys this week and interviewed him about the inicident and what led him to do it. I was pretty apprehensive about this meeting to be honest. The law is a little bit grey about the killing of monkeys when on the farms. In the forest the monkeys are protected and it’s illegal to hunt or kill them (or capture them), but once the monkeys come out into farmers’ fields they are essentially allowed to do whatever they feel they need to to protect their crops, and the rangers basically turn a blind eye to it. However people are still very nervous about admitting to anything like this.  It took quite a while to find out who had actually set out the poison in the farm and it’s only because I have such a strong, long term connection to the village that people were willing to tell me the truth and I was surprised that the farmer in question was willing to talk to me. In fact, he was really keen to speak to me and the interview went extremely well. He was open and honest about everything and was happy to be filmed talking about it. I deliberately conducted the interview in his farm, to make sure I didn’t disrupt his day too much but also to keep it as informal as possible. I speak fluent indonesian so didn’t use a translator which also helped to keep it informal. Had we conducted the interview in his home I am sure it would have been a very different atmosphere. As it was it was actually more like a really good chat than an interview.

La Tule (the farmer), is a subsistence farmer. He’s been farming his whole life and his farms support his family. At the moment he has a couple of farms, but only one is producing subsistence crops (maize, banana, sweet potato, papaya etc), the others are long-term plantation crops like coconut, cashew nut and cacao.  A few months ago his crop of bananas was just coming up to being ready for harvest,  but the troop of monkeys raided his farm every day and pretty much decimated the crop. This is what pushed him over the edge and led him to buy an extremely powerful vertebrate poison known locally as “Temix”. This was no easy decision – this poison cost him 250,000 rp for half an ounce (£20) which, for a farmer here, is several months income but the loss of his banana crop was too much for him to bear. Unlike other crops bananas are currently fetching a reasonable price at the local market. The money he gets from selling some of his bananas is used to send his children to school and to buy rice etc to eat. Monkeys raid other crops too, like papaya and maize, but these don’t fetch good prices at market and as long as there is some left for him and his family to eat he doesn’t mind the loss as much. The only way to prevent the monkeys damaging his bananas is to guard the farm all day, every day. But he also has to guard the farm all night as well, to prevent the wild pigs raiding, so aside from being exhausted, it also means he can’t use the days to try to find odd jobs and other work elsewhere, or tend to his other farms. So he took the decision to gather as much cash as he could and buy the poison. He laced bananas with it and laid them out in the farm. As usual, the monkeys came to raid the farm and took the poisoned bananas, within an hour 19 individuals were dead.

The last time poison was used on the monkeys in this village was around 2002, by the same farmer. Why had he used it then? The same reason as now – because the monkeys were destroying his banana crop. Why hadn’t he used it at all since 2002? Well, it’s fairly simple – he hadn’t been growing bananas since then! Asked if he would use poison again he said he definitely would – if he had the money, and if he was growing bananas. So that’s not a great outlook for the monkeys!

Interestingly though he isn’t bothered so much about the monkeys taking other crops, and in fact he told me that he is happy when they come and take the cashew nut fruits because they only eat the fruit, dropping the nuts to the ground and leaving them.  As long as he has cleared his farm of grass and weeds he can then come and collect the nuts easily from the ground without having to climb the tree – so he welcomes the monkeys during the cashew season.

This is one of the things that makes this research site so interesting – we have a pretty major human-wildlife conflict. We have a threatened species of monkey whose habitat is rapidly dimishing, being forced to come out into farmers’ fields to get enough food. Yet we also have local farmers with nothing but their farms to sustain them and provide for them and their children and with monkeys stealing up to 90% of farmers’ crops, leaving farmers having to guard their farms all day to scare the monkeys away who can blame them for occasionally losing the plot and resorting to poison? But what is so interesting and provides so much hope and potential for the conservation of this species is that these incidences of lethal deterrence are so rare and there’s actually a huge degree of tolerance here. It’s that tolerance that needs to be fostered, along with control of the habitat destruction, in order to provide a future both for the monkeys and the local people.

Interviewing La Tule in his farm

Carrying out some of the banana crop to take it to market

Loading up the bike to take the bananas to market

Monkey with a mouthful of banana!