There is actually historical precedent for this. From "Rewilding the world" (a great book I highly recommend) we find this about the Terai region of Nepal: >Bu

There is actually historical precedent for this. From "Rewilding the world" (a great book I highly recommend) we find this about the Terai region of Nepal: >But in the mid-1950s, His Majesty’s Government of Nepal launched a massive mosquito-eradication program, and malaria) was vanquished. Subsequently, the population of the valleys tripled, with a flood of humanity moving down from the hills, where life was harder and agriculture poorer. The influx caused a rapid carving up of the entire Terai, from east to west, and turned it into the rice bowl of Nepal. Until the 1960s, the Terai was _ thickly populated with elephants, most of which were wiped out when the area was converted to agriculture, leaving a tiny remnant group in the west. Indeed, due to such habitat loss, the Asian species is far more endangered than the African, with only forty to fifty thousand left in the wild. Athough heavily logged and converted to agriculture, the Terai still contained forested pockets that held untold riches in endemic plants, bird species, and three of the most endangered large mammals on earth: Asian elephant, Bengal tiger, and the greater one-horned rhino. In addition, there were two perilously endangered freshwater species, the gharial crocodile and the Gangetic dolphin.