Haidir Anwar Tanjung, The Jakarta Post, Pekanbaru, Riau

Wild animals in Sumatra are competing harder for natural resources with people seeking profits from forests and other natural resources, experts said last week.

Worse yet, these wild animals are also hunted by unscrupulous profit seekers, endangering their existence, they said.

According to the National Biodiversity National Reference Unit (BNRU), clashes between people and wild animals in May 2002 alone resulted in the killing of at least 17 elephants in Barumun in South Tapanuli regency, North Sumatra, while clashes with tigers in Basilam in Dumai regency, Riau, claimed the lives of five people.

"The conflict is mostly driven by people's activities in forests. These people are often unfair and lack proper respect for wild animals' survival and habitat," BNRU director Adi Susminato said here last week.

He added that large-scale plantation development, forest burning and illegal hunting contributed significantly to the conflicts.

Indonesia's World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Sumatra director Nazir Foead indicated that the human-wildlife conflict had posed a serious threat to animal conservation.

"The conflict has reached a critical level and will impose a burden on society if forests are continuously converted into commercial estates," he said.

I Made Subadia, director general of forest protection and nature conservation at the Ministry of Forestry, concurred and said that if no drastic measures were taken animals like rhinos, tigers and elephants would eventually become extinct.

Speaking to The Jakarta Post here, Made said the population of those wild animals had shrunk over the years, with elephants in Sumatra registered at between 2,330 and 3,354, tigers at 500 and rhinos at only 132 in 2001.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Kerinci Seblat National Park, Rudyanto Tjahyo was quoted by Antara as saying in Padang on Saturday that only 10 two-horn Sumatra rhinos were now living in the park. All of them lived in the North Bengkulu regency area.

To protect these rhinos, Rudyanto said the park management, in cooperation with the Indonesian Rhino Conservation Association, had taken steps to protect the North Bengkulu regency area of the park from human activities.

In an effort to protect wild animals in Sumatra, Made Subadia said the government had helped establish rhino and tiger protection areas as well as an elephant training center.

The government was also considering a proposal from the Riau province to make the Tesso Nilo forests in Kuantan Singingi, Kampar and Pelalawan regencies an elephant conservation center.