Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar

"It’s formidable. The first part of the book is deep history and context. I’d single out McConnell and Kull’s chapter, which starts with the claim made by Henri Perrier de la Bâthie in 1921 that 90% of Madagascar’s original forest had already disappeared. A few years ago, Defra convened a workshop to discuss possible environmental initiatives in Madagascar. At the start of a breakout session, one of the ‘experts’ in my group said earnestly, ‘it’s really important to take this seriously because 90% of Madagascar’s original forests have disappeared.’ To which I replied, ‘Well, that’s really good news. That figure was published a century ago, which means no forest has been destroyed in the last 100 years!’ In other publications, Perrier de la Bâthie’s figure went as low as 70%. The point is, it was made up, a rhetorical number — there was, and remains, no way of knowing — yet 90% gets repeated at a Defra workshop more than a century later. After tracing citations of the 90% figure through serious academic publications over recent decades and dispatching it, McConnell and Kull go on to explain the complexity and difficulty of developing reliable estimates of forest cover and measuring forest change, even with state-of-the-art technology. Other chapters in Scales’ volume examine environmental policy changes of the last 50 years, what is happening today, the different ways in which people think about environmental challenges, and the many factors often involved. One example comes from a chapter by Scales himself, which I use in my book. When you’re out in the countryside in Madagascar, you often see people with axes, chopping away at trees. In the southwest, huge swaths of dry forest disappeared between about 1990 and 2000. Why did that happen? It turns out there were many hands on the axe. A well-intentioned EU directive offered tax breaks and tariff reductions for developing countries that wanted to expand their economies and export markets. Réunion decided to build its pig husbandry industry. The pigs needed to be fed, and there wasn’t enough space to grow food for them in Réunion. The Malagasy government seized the opportunity and built silos to store maize in the southwest, and the word went out: ‘you can get a good price for maize.’ Small-scale farmers cleared forest and planted vast areas with maize, for export to Réunion to feed the pigs. But then the Réunion government realized it was cheaper to buy maize from Brazilian agribusinesses and Madagascar’s export market collapsed. The maize now goes to feed the poultry industry in the capital of Madagascar. Meanwhile, great tracts of dry forest in the southwest have disappeared. The usual explanation is that poverty and the need to put food on the table are the primary drivers of forest clearance in rural areas. Not so in this instance (and many others): a seemingly benign EU policy directive was the main driver of this environmental nightmare. The general thrust of chapters in Scales’ book is that environmental policies and laws are quite strong, but that too often the policies are not carried through or the laws enforced. The reason it’s an important and interesting book in my view is that it explores, explains and also debates the complexities that underlie what is happening. I do wish Scales had come up with a better title, because it sounds dull – but it isn’t. At all!"