EIGHT
The Bank corrals the donors
Russ Mittermeier’s draft Environmental Action Plan was mainly about forests and lemurs. In 1987 Barber Conable, president of the World Bank, had announced that the Bank would undertake country-wide national environmental assessments. Madagascar was the first country to take up the offer. Léon Rajaobelina, the Malagasy ambassador to the USA, applauded the move, but stressed, ‘We are tired of being studied from the outside. What we need is a truly Malagasy plan which leads to concrete actions on the ground.’1
Léon Rajaobelina was not an ordinary ambassador. He had been governor of Madagascar’s Central Bank after working in the IMF. Madagascar posted one of its brightest and most influential economists in the key role of negotiating with the Washington institutions which held the purse strings of the Malagasy economy through the overwhelming burden of debt.2
A leading World Bank environmental economist, François Falloux, and his colleagues spent the next two years drawing up a much more ambitious document. It tackled questions from fuelwood to soil conservation, environmental policy, an environmental information system, land tenure, urban and rural environment, wetlands, biodiversity, ecotourism, environmental research and development of human resources. In 1988, Falloux led a large mission to Madagascar to consult widely with people there.
By 1989 the multifaceted Environmental Action Plan had been drafted. It was usually called the EAP, but people tried to remember to say NEAP: National Environmental Action Plan. The aid agencies funded a NEAP support cell in Madagascar of some 150 Malagasy experts to give national substance to the EAP. Falloux writes: ‘The government had the wisdom not to entrust the NEAP preparations directly to the existing government structure … even though the CAPAE [the support cell] was sponsored by the Directorate of Planning.’ The ambivalence in this wording for a donor-funded agency outside existing government structures reflects the disparity between donor and government influence that dogs the whole history of the NEAP.3
Now the Plan would need multi-donor backing.
I continued to be amazed to be invited to such meetings. Berndt von Droste of Unesco, mostly concerned with the education facet, seemed to think I had something to contribute.
January 27, 1989, Washington DC.
On the fourth floor of the main World Bank building, past the flags and the front door guard, up the teak-colored elevator, past the great square central hall hung with photorealist murals of parrots and women and tropical flowers, into conference room E with coffee urns in the anteroom and a glimpse of curved teak table beyond.
We are milling around drinking coffee and greeting: gray men in gray suits. There is only one black delegate, a silent African from UNDP. And one woman, a tall, elegant German with militarily short hair, a bright crimson dress, black sweater, belly-length pearl necklace and crimson lipstick—the kind of red and black that is more aggressively executive than gray (she didn’t actually say anything though). In fact, the softest things in the room were Chuck Lankester’s curly beard, and François Falloux’s glorious spade beard and parted mustachios, like a De Brazza’s monkey.
Russ Mittermeier is older. The gray streaks are taking the color from his hair, which is short, not the flowing brown mane of two years ago. He has a mustache: a straight bristly line, though he fingers it and says he plans to outdo the Kaiser Wilhelm curlicues of emperor tamarins. And he is much thinner, with sharp hollows under the cheekbones, instead of beefy musculature.
He does a double-take when he sees me, too, then recovers by saying I’d put my hair up. In fact, I had bought a new suit: beige and black business tweed with a discreet red stripe, and an ecru silk blouse. Mother’s pearls make me completely effaced, with hair more pearl now than brown. A perfect disguise for attending the World Bank, I thought.
We filed in and sat down at the curved table, twenty to a side, with Hans Wyss of the World Bank chairing, Madagascar’s Ambassador Rajaobelina at his right hand, Russ at his left. I took one of the observers’ seats, behind Berndt von Droste of Unesco, who had invited me. Officials had place cards.
Rajaobelina opened the session by saying he must pay tribute to two people who had done more than anyone else to promote conservation in Madagascar, over the past twenty years: Alison Jolly and Russ Mittermeier. I found myself grinning like an idiot, looking round the room at each person like a ballerina bowing with her bouquet. Berndt turned round in his chair and clapped silently.
Then the ambassador opened formally. This extraordinary initiative honors Madagascar, and reflects the country’s political will to conserve its environment. The president of Madagascar himself takes an interest in the outcome of today’s meeting. Above all, though, the program we are about to launch must be under Malagasy control. It must be Malagasy in reality, not just in name.
L. Sayers, USAID. Madagascar is one of the United States’ highest priorities. (Imagine anyone saying that five years ago!) Future funding for the environment and the new Centre Nationale de la protection de L’environnement is now assured. The main task now is to get it right, and to avoid false starts and failures, because the eyes of the world, and of the population of Madagascar, are all on this grand initiative.
Bernard Pasquier, the World Bank Country Officer. The Bank now has a $1 billion portfolio in Madagascar, and adds $100–$150 million every year. (Translation: $1 billion of Mad.’s $2.6 billion debt is owed to the Bank, plus interest.) No other sectors will succeed without the environment, e.g. dams, and irrigation projects in a place where 80 percent of the population is rural and most of them eat irrigated rice. Mad. loses $250–$300 million per year from erosion = 10 percent of GDP. It also pays more than 50 percent of export earnings for debt service. Needs massive debt-for-nature swaps. The Bank’s environmental commitment is firm, and projected for twenty years.
François Falloux, World Bank architect of the Environmental Action Plan. Madagascar now retains 16 percent of original forest cover. It will be zero in 2030 or 2040. The first tranche of funding will be $60 million for 5 years. But it will be spent with two-thirds for ‘development,’ one-third for biodiversity. This is a process not a product. The goal is sustainable development for a whole society.
Is it just with hindsight that I wonder about what constitutes ‘development’ in Falloux’s list? Land surveying and entitlement, marine monitoring, reforestation in the watersheds of the electricity-producing dams and the rice bowl of Lake Alaotra? In later years the Bank would stress eliminating poverty and even providing rural livelihoods, but in 1987 it was still top-down thinking—and of course loans, not grants. It was only Unesco which said anything about education.
Berndt von Droste, Unesco. We also need primary school teachers, learning packages, women’s education, science and technology, especially biotechnology, photovoltaics. Marine science: training scientists and institution-building. Look back thirty years to the pioneering foundation of the Charles Darwin Institute on the Galapagos. I put in my hobby horse of working through the Malagasy Ministry of Education rather than creating parallel structures under the pressure of the Bank.
Chuck Lankester, UNDP. UNDP has put $¼ million (out of $¾ million) into a feasibility study for how to raise funds on the necessary scale, including massively expanding debt-for-nature swaps rather than just adding new debts. Will we really look back in thirty years to today as we do now to the founding of the Charles Darwin Institute? But we must be sure to learn the lessons of the past. UNDP’s Operation Savoka has dribbled along for years as a pilot project until UNDP gave it up. Did it really wean farmers from slash and burn? Did it really offer alternatives? Why didn’t it spread, if so? (I could tell him a lot more things that didn’t work. If only I knew enough to foresee which bits of today’s grand hopes won’t. Or maybe I don’t want to know.)
Ken Piddington, World Bank Environment Section. He sees Mad.’s political will, and no generic difference between First and Third Worlds in the need to enlist support of populace round parks. (He’s a former New Zealand national parks administrator.) No word of his fears, conveyed elsewhere, that there is far too little sociological understanding in the EAP, echoing Chuck on the Savoka project’s lessons.
Russ strides round down the far end of the hall to the slide projector which has been waiting on its industrial stilt table between the two teak wings of conferees. Lights down, slides up—a massive baobab (Adansonia za, I think, from our side of the island), the standard ring-tail which has been on so many covers, his adorable mouse lemur I always start lectures with, my own slide of fossil giant lemur skulls. And statistics: highest proportion of endemics of anywhere except New Caledonia, 293 of 297 reptiles shown over a sunlit radiated tortoise, half the bird species, with that Coua cristata and its magenta and turquoise eyepatch. And so on. It’s funny to know by heart the view of the side of Nosy Mangabe’s rainforest, of the de Heaulme Aepyornis egg, of that mother and son golden bamboo lemur at Ranomafana, where other people just see a succession of unpredictable marvels. Russ ends that Madagascar right now, for richness and vulnerability, really is the first priority of all.4
After lunch, sums of financial aid promised by assembled agencies. Then late in the afternoon an aide passed a note. Ambassador Rajaobelina rose from his chair and positively scuttled to the anteroom, amazing in a man whose every move, as well as his mind, conveys penetrating sophistication. He then announced to us that the president of Madagascar himself had telephoned (at midnight Madagascar time) to ask the course of the meeting. Rajaobelina closed the session with graceful words from the chair, and then swept out, his aides behind him, with the speed and poise of a president himself—or a man who has guided his country’s next step to the future.
1. F. Falloux and L.M. Talbot, Crisis and Opportunity: Environment and Development in Africa (1993). p. 31.
2. For Léon Rajaobelina’s account of how Madagascar sank into debt, see A. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs (2004).
3. Falloux and Talbot, Crisis and Opportunity, p. 30. The support cell was officially the CAPAE, the Cellule d’Appui au Plan d’Action Environnemental.
4. The game-changing article by Norman Myers, Russ and others on biodiversity hotspots must have been already in press. They argued that 1.8 percent of the world’s land surface holds most of the world’s biodiversity, and that the top twenty-five of them hold 44 percent of flowering plant species and 35 percent of vertebrate species. Of these, Madagascar comes out hottest of all if one adds in the percentage of habitat loss. N. Myers, R.A. Mittermeier et al., ‘Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities’ (2000).