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Officials in southwest China's Yunnan Province are building "dinner halls" for wild elephants in the hope they'll stop devouring crops and attacking local villagers who live on the border of nature reserves in Xishuangbanna.

So far about 70 hectares of bananas and sugarcane have been planted on spare land several kilometers away from the villages. The idea is the 300 wild elephants in the area will eat these crops and leave the villagers' acreages alone.

"We've planted the crops on land that no one is using. It's near the river where the elephants like to wallow and play," says Li Zhiyong, head of the Wild Animal Protection Office of the Xishuangbanna Forestry Bureau.

Li hopes the elephants will become accustomed to dining out on the nearby easy pickings and stop straying into local communities

So far the experiment has had mixed results but local villagers are happy something is being done to stop the elephants from stomping down their crops and attacking them. "We're willing to help feed the elephants if it stops them from harassing us," says Wang Qiongxian, who lost a quarter of her crop to elephants last year.

Last year wild elephants spoiled crops belonging to 12,000 households in 578 villages in the area. Twenty villagers were attacked and three were killed.

In April, the Yunnan provincial government allocated 4 million yuan (US$500,000) to Xishuangbanna to compensate farmers for damage caused by wild elephants, 20 times more than what was budgeted last year, said Li.

While the people belonging to the Dai minority in the region consider the elephant to be sacred they face a conundrum: how to avoid destruction and injury while allowing the world's largest land mammals to flourish.

In the 1980's there were only 80 wild elephants in the region but conservation measures have helped their numbers almost quadruple. There are seven nature reserves in Xishuangbanna occupying just over 12 percent of the prefecture.

According to research by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Xishuangbanna boasts the last well-preserved band of rain forest on the Tropic of Cancer.

There are an estimated 50,000 Asian elephants living in the wild throughout the continent.

(Xinhua News Agency July 1, 2006)