As in India, tigers in Nepal may seek refuge in sugarcane fields

By Abhaya Raj Joshi*  

On the morning of August. 1 in Dodhara-Chandani, a town on the banks of Mahakali, which serves as the western border between Nepal and India, a 23-year-old woman was attacked and killed by a tiger while working next to a sugarcane field.

The big cat emerged from the sugarcane field and struck a blow on her head, killing the woman instantly.

In May 2023, a tiger was reported to roam the Kalika Community Forest near the Nepal-India border in Bhajani Municipality-5 in far-western Nepal. According to local officials, the tiger was believed to have emerged from the surrounding sugarcane fields following the harvest season.

“Although the relationship between tigers and sugarcane fields has been well documented in neighboring India, such work hasn’t been carried out in Nepal,” researcher Baburam Lamichhane said.

While India is the second-largest sugarcane producer in the world, sugarcane farming has rapidly expanded in Nepal, from around 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) in 1961 to around 62,500 hectares (155,000 acres) in 2022, thanks to government incentives that make it ab easy-to-grow cash crop. The bulk of the growth has taken place in the Terai region of Nepal on the floodplains of the Koshi, Narayani, Karnali and Mahakali.

Barring Koshi, the floodplains of the remaining three rivers in Nepal have seen another expansion during the same period—that of the population of Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris).

“The nature of sugarcane farms is such that they mimic the tall grasslands found inside tiger habitats in protected areas,” said conservationist and researcher Shant Raj Jnawali.

Jnawali’s views are similar to those of Rahul Shukla, an Indian conservationist who has studied “sugarcane tigers” for decades. In a recent interview with Down to Earth, he said that the sugarcane fields not only provide cover for tigers but also prey such as wild boars and feral cattle. Some tigers are even born and raised in cane fields and become naturalized to living in human-dominated landscapes, he said.

As the population of tigers increases in Nepal due to crackdowns on poaching and habitat management, weak and old individuals are known to be pushed toward the fringes. Also, during dispersal, tigers are known to travel long distances to look for safe places to live.

Sugarcane farms may provide refuge to such tigers, Lamichhane said, as other animals such as rhinos and leopards have also been found to take shelter in sugarcane farms in Nepal. Also, they could survive on wild boars known to inhabit sugarcane farms, he said. Camera trap research is needed to determine the extent of use.

But installing camera traps is a challenging task in the sugarcane fields. “Putting up camera traps in protected areas and forests is easy, as we just need to get permission from the government,” researcher Kanchan Thapa said. “But the sugarcane farms are on private property,” he said, adding that as individual land holding in Nepal is comparatively small, getting permission from private property owners would be a tough task.

Also, the government doesn’t maintain separate data on tiger attacks on humans living close to sugarcane fields. A total of 38 people were killed in tiger attacks in Nepal between 2019 and 2023.

However, the sugarcane industry in Nepal faces a bleak future, as it is losing its popularity among farmers. Indian sugar is cheaper due to economies of scale, and farmers have long been complaining about not getting payment for their produce on time. They even marched en masse to Kathmandu recently to demand that they be paid at the earliest.

There are also those who aren’t convinced that the issue could become a big problem in the future. Maheshwar Dhakal, former director-general at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, said that although the Dodhara-Chandani incident took place in a sugarcane field, it would be too early to jump to a conclusion that tigers are taking refuge on sugarcane farms. “We shouldn’t generalize based on a single incident,” he said.

That Nepal’s sugarcane fields are small compared with India’s vast expanse of farms is another reason critics don’t buy the argument. Shyam Kumar Shah, senior ecologist at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, said sugarcane fields in Nepal are also fragmented into small parcels of land. “This means that there is no contiguous passage for tigers, which  need large areas to move around, to roam around in the field without getting spotted.

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*Staff writer for Nepal at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @arj27. Source: Mongabay