Saving Madagascar’s lemurs
Le défi de la préservation des lémuriens à Madagascar
Ecologie et pauvreté sont-elles conciliables ?
Madagascar est l’un des pays les plus pauvres au monde. Plus de 90% de la population y vit avec moins de deux dollars par jour. Comment, dans ces conditions, résister au braconnage et au crime organisé ? Comment, également, sensibiliser ses habitants à la protection et à la conservation de la faune et de la flore endémiques ?
ANAENEVOKA, Madagascar — The road to Maromizaha Forest in Madagascar winds through hills dotted with charred stumps resembling broken teeth. Trucks roar past a woman named Madeleine, who sits by the road chipping away at gran- ite slabs, making gravel. The hills above were once covered in trees, teeming with shrieking lemurs. But the forest is dying. It is being destroyed by desperately poor families who survive by selling firewood or charcoal, and by well-connected crime syndicates who get rich on illegal mining and logging. Madagascar has committed to the U.N.’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals to combat corruption, protect forests and biodiversity, and eliminate poverty by 2030. But its failure to stem corruption only fuels deforestation.
BURNING UP
2. More than a year ago the government declared the Maromizaha Forest a national park, banning charcoal burning, farming, logging and mining. That changed everything for people living in a dozen nearby villages. Until then, each farmer would burn new forest every year to plant crops, in a slash-and-burn method known here as tavy.
3. “The more protected the forest is, the harder life has become,” said Madeleine, 59, who like many here has one name. “We can’t do charcoal any more. We have been doing slash and burn farming for generations, but since they protected the forest, there’s nothing for us to do.” She breaks rocks to survive. Her hammer rings out like a steely woodpecker and shards of stone fly. There is blood on her finger where she hit herself.
4. Telolahy Lesabotsy, 36, a farmer with five children, feels impotent and furious. Last year, he thought he could get away with chopping down a tree and burning charcoal a few yards inside the national park. He was arrested, faced a village tribunal and was warned never to do it again. “I am really struggling now. I’m even afraid that my children will have to beg on the road. They have never been to school. I have no money for meat. I am really, really poor.”
ENDANGERED SPECIES
5. Lemurs, found only in Madagascar, are the most threatened mammal group on Earth, according to a 2014 paper by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Madagascar has more than 110 species of lemurs, some which grow to 3 feet in height, others as small as a mouse, 90 percent of them facing extinction because of deforestation. Madagascar has lost 80 percent of its forest, half of that since the 1950s, according to Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency, a nongovernment group that investigates environmental crimes.
6. “We have a saying here: ‘An empty stomach has no ears.’ If people can’t eat, how can you save the lemurs?” said Jonah Ratsimbazafy, who heads the local Group for Study and Research on Primates of Madagascar, known as GERP. “If you ask people to be part of your conservation effort and they’re dying, forget it,” he said. “When people have got little access to food, education and health, conservation is not easy.” It is, however, easy for crime networks to bribe poorly paid forest rangers and law enforcement officials, Ratsimbazafy said.
7. Complicating the problem is Madagascar’s changing climate. The more the population consumes the forests, the drier the country becomes and the more frequent are the droughts that lock people into poverty.
EDUCATION
8. Last year, the government asked GERP to manage the Maromizaha Forest. The organization trains villagers as forest patrollers and teaches farmers how to avoid slash-andburn cropping. It helps people find new livelihoods including fish farming, beekeeping, working in hotels and restaurants and acting as guides or porters for lemur researchers and tourists. But some villagers are unconvinced.
9. “Some people shout at us and some even threaten us,” said Joseph Marson, 46, a member of the unarmed forest patrol team. In August, two farmers illegally clearing the forest threatened to attack him and other patrollers with machetes. “They said, ‘We’ll kill you and none of you will leave the forest alive.’”
10. In his small room, Filgence Rakotoarimanana’s pillow lies yards away from the trucks that grind by day and night. With his wife, Soahamarina, and six children, he farms at the edge of the forest, planting beans, potatoes and cassava to sell.
11. His youngest girl, Hantarianina, 18 months old, squalls and plunges her fingers into a pot with the dregs of some cold boiled cornmeal. A gray parrot, captured from the forest, hops around the room, pecking at specks of grain.
12. “We are angry,” Soahamarina said. “We used to do charcoal. That was our main livelihood. Since they told us to protect the forest, we get no benefit from it. We’re poorer. We don’t have money. We don’t even have enough to feed our children.”
13. But the GERP project is gaining supporters. Local farmer Razafimahatratra joined the forest patrollers last year, fearing that “even our generation won’t see trees anymore” if the destruction continues. “The animals are disappearing. We used to see them at the side of the road. Now, you have to go deep into the forest to find them,” Razafimahatratra said. “Most people don’t care about the animals. They’re just worried about putting food on the table.”