PART III
Environment and development
Putting conservation into action brought its own problems, exemplified by the Ranomafana National Park. The biodiversity arm of the National Environmental Action Plan, the NEAP, focused on a few great Integrated Conservation and Development Programs. These ICDPs built on the Biosphere Reserve idea pioneered by Roland Albignac at the aye-ayes’ home, Mananara. A central core would be off-limits to anything but research. A peripheral zone would ensure conservation of the center, open to all local non-destructive use, but not to tavy. Outside this again would be help for the fringing villagers to alter and improve their lives. Two NGOs or universities would contract to carry out the plan: one for research on the natural ecosystems, one to bolster local conservation and development. The donors had been bashed for their mistakes elsewhere. In Madagascar, let the NGOs get it right.
All clear on paper, but so naive.
First, local people had used the whole area of the reserves for generations. The integral cores were long since protected by French fiat, but villagers knew where the ancestral tombs lay inside the parks. Second, tavy was and is a principal use of the forest. Third, even the comparable cost of wood, herbs and crayfish was a challenge. In Ranomafana most lemur meat was fady, taboo, but in the Makira region by Masoala a recent study found that 57 percent of family cash income is from bushmeat. All told, returns from the forest are far higher than the outsiders guessed at first: in the Mantadia area near Andsibe it was way over $100 per family in a place where national per capita income was around $220, averaged between rich and poor—and these families were poor.1
Fourth, most important of all, the geography was wrong. Each vast forest tract had a 5 km fringe of villages to be ‘improved.’ 5 km is nothing to people who walk that far to drop in on a neighbor, sometimes 20 km to sell a chicken or a basket of fruit. Genese Sodikoff, writing about the Mananara Park, gives a wonderful riff on the importance of feet. The forest guardians that she knew measured their prowess by the strength of their feet. Feet with strong calluses against thorns and sharp stones. Feet with strong toes to curl into slippery clay and over rainforest roots. Feet that can walk for days over mountain trails. An arbitrary limit of 5 km between villages to help and those to leave aside could only send ill feeling, even though there might be far too many villages to help even with this criterion.2
On top of all, the first evaluations would come within three years. The NGOs had to show results. In short, an impossibility.
Ranomafana National Park faced the same dilemmas as all the other ICDPs. It is the outstanding success of Ranomafana’s research that brings the resentment by surrounding villagers into sharp relief. Chapter 12 describes my first visit to Ranomafana, in 1986, when a new species of lemur had just been discovered: a red bamboo-eating creature with golden chipmunk cheeks—nobody yet was sure what it was. By 1987 the indefatigably enthusiastic Patricia Wright allied with Malagasy conservationists to dedicate the golden bamboo lemur’s forest as a future national park. Chapter 13 gives an account of this period—already with a blooming lemur research camp, but the problems of local people already looming on the horizon of the eager naturalists. Chapter 14, 1993, with the National Park established, tells how the king’s spokesman of a nearby village stated bluntly that conservation is the new colonialism. The park simply took away their land. Integrated Conservation and Development programs had been lavishly funded by USAID, but Chapter 15 shows how the two parts of the Ranomafana program came spectacularly unstuck, an extreme instance of what was happening to such efforts all round the island-continent. The dilemma continued even in 2005, as we see in chapter 16, which ends with the DreamWorks visit.
Nonetheless, Ranomafana’s research arm has since deservedly become one of the best-known successes of Madagascar. In Chapter 17, 1997, Patricia Wright and I meet the formidable president of Madagascar, Didier Ratsiraka: she to promote Ranomafana National Park, myself the forthcoming International Primatological Congress. A summary of current research is on the website of Stony Brook University, but a taste of researchers’ joy is given in Chapter 18, where Malagasy and foreigners join in 1998 to celebrate the first international congress since 1985: joy summed up as ‘Madame Berthe was Dancing.’3
1. P. Shyamsundar and R.A. Kramer, ‘Tropical forest protection: an empirical analysis of the costs born by local people’ (1996); P. Shyamsundar and R.A. Kramer, ‘Biodiversity conservation—at what cost? A study of households in the vicinity of Mantadia National Park’ (1997); C.D. Golden, M.J. Bonds et al., ‘Economic valuation of subsistence harvest of wildlife in Madagascar’ (2013).
2. G.M. Sodikoff, Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (2012).
3. www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/centre-valbio.