Elephants and people have been in conflict for as long as farmers have been growing crops. When farmers cultivate near elephant refugees, inevitably elephants will try to consume the foods that humans grow. Played out night after night, both people and elephants are dying on both sides of a spiralling war that the elephants will and do eventually lose; just another place where elephants have become locally extinct.

Only 20% of elephant range is formally protected in Africa and increasingly, rural farmers and elephants share the same landscape as agriculture expands and growing elephant populations are compressed.

In this situation elephants can cause widespread damage to food crops and compete with communities for land and resources. In some situations elephants are part of the causes of malnutrition in communities where elephants raid night after night. Conversely, the conversion of woodland to farmland threatens the elephant's survival thus managing agriculture and elephants within the same area presents a complex problem.

This conflict is widespread and common as elephants raid food crops, grain stores, damage houses, and occasionally injure and kill people and their livestock. Their presence near villages can cause widespread fear, and has many secondary implications for rural villagers. Elephants compete with villagers for resources such as wild fruits and water and farmers have to protect their crops at night, an activity that is dangerous, reduces productivity, and increases the risks of catching diseases such as malaria.

It is widely accepted that rural farmers bear the costs of living with elephants and receive little of the benefits. Even where community-based conservation initiatives exist, and elephants generate large revenues, little of the money filters down to the rural household level. Resolving conflict between humans and elephants is one of the most pressing wildlife management issues in Africa. The costs must be reduced and the benefits increased if elephants are to persist outside protected areas. In addition habitat loss is a factor that threatens elephant survival as farmers transform natural landscapes by clearing woodland habitat for agriculture. Elephants, while tolerant of human disturbance to some degree, are unable to survive when the landscape becomes dominated by farmland. It is therefore imperative that elephant habitat requirements are understood, so that land can be prioritised for conservation.

Subsistence farmers have many different traditional methods for protecting crops including beating drums, cracking whips, burning fires and a variety of other noise making devices. More recent methods include electric fencing, chemical repellents, and disturbance shooting. These approaches have had some success but have maintenance problems and high capital costs. The effectiveness of traditional methods (e.g. burning fires, making noise) diminishes over time as elephants habituate to them.