PART II

Politics

From 1985 to 1991, Western conservationists saw a huge opportunity: a political moment when it might be possible to mobilize funds and energy to save the extraordinary natural riches of Madagascar. The environmental movement had taken off in America. Now, here was a semi-virgin country: a country of socialist xenophobia which then announced in its 1985 conference that it wanted aid for its environment. No wonder we jumped in.

The next chapters range from the mid-altitude rainforests of Andasibe to the meeting rooms of the World Bank and back again to Antananarivo, the country’s capital, as the Bank and foreign donors and the Malagasy government argued out their aid package. Even the donors were infected by idealism for a project to tackle the most urgent environmental needs of an entire country. The Malagasy, long battered by colonialism, were more sceptical of this new effort to foist large loans on the country in the service of a foreign ideology.

By 1991, the package was triumphantly launched as the NEAP: The National Environmental Action Plan. The NEAP’s multifaceted project had its own secretariat to coordinate multi-donor funding, and a prospective scope of three stages over the next fifteen years. The six-year journey from 1985 to 1991 involved a huge amount of effort, idealism and controversy.

Chapter 6 tells of the ‘seed money’ pledged by the Alton Jones Foundation in 1986. The part I tell of their ambitious tour is only in the rainforest of Andasibe. I couldn’t resist adding a vignette of my own first view of lemurs in that same forest back in 1962. In 1987, Chapter 7, that seed money supported the comedy of a high-level Malagasy delegation touring American zoos. The Malagasy did gradually begin to understand where all these foreign lemur-lovers were coming from! Chapter 8, 1989, is the World Bank in Washington, and Chapter 9, 1989, the donors in action in the Antananarivo Hilton and back in Andasibe, thrashing out the NEAP. Chapter 10 is the tragedy of teenage Bedo, an allegory of the perils of too much money in too poor a land. Still in 1989, this period culminated in the apparent triumph of conservation planning for Madagascar. In Chapter 11, Barber Conable, president of the World Bank, drags much of the Malagasy cabinet forth to hear the indri sing in the rainforest of Andasibe.