Land use Conflicts in the Buffer Zones of Sinharaja Forest Reserve: A Case Study on the North Western Slope of the Sinharaja Forest Reserve

Abstract

Sinharaja is a rainforest located in Sri Lanka between 6° 21' - 6° 26' Northern longitudes and 80° 30' - 30° 34' Eastern latitudes. It covers an area of 11,187 hectares spread over the Galle, Matara and Rathnapura Districts. Relative to the various land use patterns in the Sinharaja forest periphery - identified as tea (75.8%), rubber (7.6%), cinnamon (4.5%), coconut (7.6%), paddy (1.5%) and mixed crops (3.03%) - numerous land use conflicts between children and parents, siblings and neighbours are reported from the 20% of the households surveyed. While the lands included inthe study area are on the whole identified as 58% private and 42% state, the results showed that the land utilisation by 54% of the sample families was illegal. Harmful effects of land use activities have made river and forest reservations of the North-western (NW) slope of the Sinharaja susceptible to natural disasters. Against this background, the main objective of this study was to familiarise the nature of the land use conflicts in the Northern buffers of the Sinharaja forest reserve. The other objectives were to study the types of land use patterns, time periods of land use activities, ownership of the lands in the study area and effects of the land use activities that lead to an increase in natural hazards. The study concentrated on a stratified sample of 20% of the total population of 300 families in five villages - Kudawa, Pethiyakanda, Buthkanda, Pitakele and Ketalapaththala – in the Kudawa Grama Niladhari Division in the Kalawana DS Division of the Rathnapura District that represents the NW slope of the Sinharaja forest periphery. The methods adopted for the data collection in the study were a house-tohouse questionnaire survey, interviews and field observations, and the results were analysed using simple statistics such as percentages, SPSS and Chi-square test.