Man vs Wild – a vivid illustration of development colliding with nature.

In India's far east, wild elephants are in deadly, daily conflict with people. Siobhan Heanue follows the clashes as roaming herds get squeezed by shrinking forests and a growing human population.

Our Indian cameraman Gurmeet saw the attack as he fled…

"I saw a cloud of dust, one elephant charging over one man, and that man got under the feet of the elephant. We thought ‘this dude is dead'"

The man under the elephant was our local guide, Sanu. Amazingly he survived, with just a few scratches.

"My feet slipped… the elephant hit me. I'm lucky, or I'd be dead by now," Sanu explains to his wife. "Why were you such a show-off?" she snaps.

Danger is ever-present in Assam state in India's north east, where 6000 elephants live among 30 million people. The animals' forest habitat is being sliced up for new rice paddies, tea plantations, roads and villages. Their old migratory trails, up to 1000 kilometres long, are strewn with man-made obstacles.

So the big herds are hemmed in, with nowhere to go. They raid villages and crops for food. They kill and terrify local people. Last year in Assam state alone, elephants killed at least 64 people.

Elephants are sacred in India and evoke the image of the popular Hindu deity Ganesh. But patience is thin among farmers when entire rice harvests are destroyed.

"Yes, they're hungry but we're hungry too," says Sharayan Bodo, who guards his crop at night armed with a crude spear. "Lord Ganesh is a god, but elephants are not."

As correspondent Siobhan Heanue discovers, the elephants are taunted nearly everywhere they go as crowds of locals pelt them with rocks, firecrackers and shot pellets. Sometimes they move on, as intended. Sometimes they attack.

"I'm still shaking from the noise and ferocity of something that big coming towards you," says Heanue, after fleeing an angry female elephant which had been separated from her calf.

"Due to the encounters with humans, the elephants have changed their behaviour," says conservationist and filmmaker Rita Banarji. "They are more aggressive than they used to be."

Despite the conflict and a recent fall in India's elephant population, Banarji is determinedly optimistic. She sees a "win-win situation" ahead and sets out how to strike a delicate balance between the needs of people and those of the giants that roam among them.

Behind our craving for vanilla-flavoured ice cream, cakes and chocolate, or for vanilla-scented perfumes, there's a rattling tale of fast money, skulduggery and the precarious fate of an iconic animal.

A few years ago, the humble vanilla bean sold for $80 a kilo. Now it's $800. In vividly beautiful, dirt-poor Madagascar, supplier of most of the world's vanilla, that means good times roll.

Vanilla is the best, vanilla is the crazy money. No income better in Madagascar - and I think the world! – Yockno, who is swapping tour guiding for vanilla farming.

By day, Prisco is a hustler who buys and sells vanilla in the street. By night, in a seedy bar, he sings of his love for the bean, and what it can get him…

Girl, come and weigh the vanilla, there's enough for whatever you want! – Prisco's song lyric

Prisco is a bit player in a vast vanilla ecosystem. In the vanilla hub of Sambava, brokers plough money into shiny multi-story mansions. In big export warehouses, women sort their way through hillocks of beans. They're frisked before they go home, just in case they've filched any.

In rural areas at harvest time, small farmers guard their crops overnight from roaming thieves. If the farmers catch them, justice is swift and sometimes deadly.

They can do crazy things to them – Yockno, tour guide and vanilla farmer

Long before the tense harvest, there's an operation that demands the utmost delicacy. Each vanilla flower must be hand-pollinated – a trick invented by a 12-year-old slave boy in the 1840s. Using a tiny thorn, Yockno shows reporter Adam Harvey how it's done.

So what I do is push this tongue up….

It's all precision – and timing. Each flower is ready for pollination for only one morning each year.

…. and I press softly the male to the female. So now it's done.

Vanilla is surely sweet for Madagascar's people, but not for its most celebrated characters – the exquisite lemurs popularised by the Madagascar movie. High vanilla prices are putting pressure on the lemurs' habitat as forest is illegally cut to grow the beans.

But as Harvey and the Foreign Correspondent team trek deep into the jungle, they discover – to their delight – that lemurs are hanging on defiantly. Our cameras capture them – bamboo lemurs, white-headed lemurs and critically endangered silky safakas, one of the world's rarest mammals – in all their glory.