Earlier this week the BBC reported that seven elephants, one a pregnant female, had been found dead in Sri Lanka from suspected poisoning.

The authorities suspect it may have been carried out by angry villagers in retaliation for destroying crops.

Farmers here have challenges from dogs worrying sheep and polecats killing chickens but imagine having a pest the size of an elephant on your land. Or a herd of them.

In Sri Lanka they have had what was described as an ‘epidemic’ of suicide in rural communities often caused by farmers suffering chronic sleep deprivation through staying awake at night to try to prevent elephants from trampling their fields.

One of the most common methods of suicide there was by using something that, until recently, was only too easy to obtain in Sri Lanka: pesticides.

The World Health Organisation has acknowledged pesticide self-poisoning as one of the most important global means of suicide, killing around 150,000 people every year. Highly toxic pesticides, often fatal if ingested, are as easy to obtain as alcohol in most of the developing world, and often kept lying around the home.

In Sri Lanka, however, a joint initiative by a British organisation, The Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP), and the Sri Lankan Department of Agriculture has been trying to tackle the problem.

Regulations were introduced to remove the most dangerous pesticides from the shelves of local hardware stores. They have been replaced with less toxic alternatives: for anyone swallowing any of these it would be unlikely to be fatal.

This simple step has seen the suicide rate in Sri Lanka drop by 70% with no reduction in agricultural yield reported so far though the CPSP is continuing to investigate this.

The CPSP is now expanding its work with projects in Taiwan, Nepal and India.However at the root of all this are trends that have an implication for us all: climate change and extreme weather patterns, coupled with increasing costs for farmers, bring extra pressures all around the world. And when it comes to competition between wildlife and farmers you only have to think of the hotly-disputed badger cull in the UK.

Sustainable agriculture as we do it in the Isle of Man (as opposed to factory-scale) is not the problem but part of the solution, should be much higher on the agenda for governments around the world. As much help and support as possible must be provided for farmers and growers everywhere who are producing food in a sustainable manner. They are the ones who will play a major role, not just in feeding us all but in helping to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.