PART V

Money

The final part takes us to the present day. To recapitulate, we began in Part I with the joy and tragedies of life in ‘traditional’ villages. The villages in fact were already impacted by much wider influences—but village structure remains the basis of rural Malagasy life. Part II was the politics of conservation in the 1980s, with the Western ideal of saving biodiversity and the mutual incomprehension between conservationists and Malagasy politicians. Part III was a case study of the difficulty of putting the ideals into practice at Ranomafana: the triumphs of research on rainforest biodiversity set against the effort to ‘develop’ peasants who have lost the land bequeathed by their ancestors and the livelihoods given by that land. Part IV moved to the semi-arid spiny forest, with the impact of drought on both lemurs and people, and the conclusion that traditional ways of life do not cope with rising population and a shrinking resource base. Both rainforest and spiny forest livelihoods must change quite fundamentally even now, let alone with the more severe weather looming through climate change.

In this final part, I hazard some opinions about what is being done—or not done—to improve life in Madagascar. Chapter 23 briefly describes political changes from 2002 to 2013: two presidents with starkly different approaches to governance. The 2009–13 rosewood massacre looted the National Parks for short-term gain. Both regimes gave in to land grabs for Asian food. Chapter 24 turns to economic changes. Is mining a promise of solid finance and indeed environmental ethics? Or inevitably the curse of corruption? The REDD initiatives, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degredation, actually pay to preserve forest carbon stocks. Is REDD the best hope ever of paying Malagasy the value of their forests? Or just another kind of land grab?

And a coda of 2013–14. Election run-ups which sometimes descended into farce—if only it didn’t matter! And yet another primatological congress in Ranomafana in August—a celebration of Madagascar’s glorious biodiversity thirty years after the 1985 conference which opened this book, with a whole new generation of Malagasy field scientists.

That 1985 conference embodied the hope for a win–win strategy for both environment and development. It has yet to happen. But it still might do so. I wish I could stay around to see it.