Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Lemurs lurch toward extinction, but all’s not lost
Efforts to stop deforestation could save mammals
Sustainable Development Goals to combat corruption, protect forests and biodiversity, and eliminate poverty by 2030. But its failure to stem corruption only fuels deforestation.
More than a year ago the ANAENEVOKA, Mada-government declared the gascar — The road toMaromizaha Forest a national Maromizaha Forest inpark, banning charcoal burnthroughing, Madagascar winds farming, logging and mincharreding. hills dotted with That changed everything stumps resembling brokenfor people living in a dozen teeth. nearby villages. Until then,
Trucks roar past a wom-each farmer would burn new an named Madeleine, whoforest every year to plant crops, sits by the road chippingin a slash-and-burn method away at granite slabs, mak-known here as tavy. ing gravel. “The more protected the
The hills above wereforest is, the harder life has beteem-come,” once covered in trees, said Madeleine, 59, who ing with shrieking lemurs.like many here has one name. But the forest is dying. “We can’t do charcoal any
It is being destroyed bymore. We have been doing desperately poor familiesslashandburnfarmingforgenfire-erations, who survive by selling but since they probytected wood or charcoal, and the forest, there’s nothsyn-ing well-connected crime for us to do.” dicates who get rich on il- She breaks rocks to survive. legal mining and logging. Her hammer rings out like a
Madagascar has commit-steely woodpecker and shards ted to the U.N.’s ambitiousof stone fly. There is blood on her finger where she hit herself.
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.”
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 of which grow to 3 feet in height, others as small as a mouse, 90 percent of them facing extinction because of deforestation.
An island off East Africa the size of Texas, 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.
“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.
At least a million logs in protected forests were felled illegally from March 2010 to March 2015, mostly endangered rosewood trees, dragged along slippery forest paths, stacked on beaches and smuggled by night onto boats headed for China and other Asian countries, according to a February report by Traffic, a conservation group.
The report exposed rampant bribe-taking, government corruption and “effective zero control” of forests because judges fail to penalize offenders.
The country lost 2.47 million acres of forest from 2005 to 2013, Traffic reported, with deforestation roaring along at 1.5 percent a year from 2010.