On October 20, Karen Freudenberger discussed looming catastrophe on Madagascar’s doorstep. The talk, entitled “Paradise Lost? Reflections on a Quarter Century of Environmental Programs in Madagascar,” began with a series of outstandingly beautiful photographs of Madagascar’s rainforest intermixed with images of slash and burn agriculture, detailing fire and destruction. 15 years ago, Madagascar had about 27 million acres of forest and 11 million people. Now, it has 22 million acres of forest and 20 million people. The rainforests of Madagascar run along a highland, holding an incredibly valuable hydrological function for the human community as a “sponge” or “water tower” for rainfall, making it absolutely essential for long-term food security. Continued deforestation will terminate this indispensable resource for Malagasy communities, making much of the island virtually uninhabitable.
Karen has been working on environmental initiatives in Madagascar since 1998. Last year, when a coup d’état forced the US to disengage in environmental funding, Karen was hired to reevaluate how best to design USAID conservation programs in the Madagascar, forcing her to look back at the last 25 years with a critical eye and ask, what worked and what didn’t work?
Between 1975 and 1985, Madagascar lost roughly one million acres of forest per year. In response, international groups joined to create a National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP). USAID was one of the many donors involved in creating a vertically integrated environmental program, which spanned from reforming national policies to local alternative practices. Attention was mainly focused on saving the last remaining tropical forests, ignoring the dry spiny forest that was just as biologically important and by now has virtually disappeared.
National policy initiatives focused on implementing a credible national park system within a government system that had never before had any environmental laws. Local level initiatives have gone through three discrete phases in the last 25 years. The original conservation phase focused exclusively on the park system. During the second phase, focus remained mainly on parks, while conservationists tried to work with proximate villages to provide community services.
But since the late 1990s, when Karen joined the scene, conservationists have taken a holistic approach, considering all actors, stakeholders, and pressures causing deforestation. During this phase, environmental aid workers helped subsistence farmers to intensify their production of the land through techniques such as anti-erosion intervention, adding fish to rice fields, and introducing bee keeping and off season crops. They organized people to rebuild transport roots because if farmers can’t get their sustainable yield crops (bananas, coffee, etc.) transported, they won’t grow them, and will engage in slash and burn instead. Environmentalists also tried to transfer management rights to communities so that they could become stakeholders in protecting resources.
A 2006 evaluation of their progress demonstrated that since forest conversion did slow in areas where interventions were applied, rice yields increased three fold, and people were willing to adopt new technologies, it actually was possible to significantly reduce the tendency toward slash and burn agriculture. But even so, deforestation was continuing at 125,000 acres per year, leaving remaining forests vulnerable. 80% of Madagascar’s forests are now located within one kilometer of non-forest edge.
What inhibited greater success? Firstly, insufficient funding. This project was funded as a biodiversity issue and the budget couldn’t support the breadth of interconnected interventions necessary. Secondly, Karen blames not-good-enough governance. The Malagasy government has been riddled by rampant and systemic corruption, a weak civil society that does not demand accountability, and periodic political crises that seriously set back economic development. Without government support, these projects can not reach to the extents that are necessary.
Karen began to question herself: “What have you really accomplished?” She urged us to understand the lessons she’d learned through so much work: Environmental change is fundamentally hostage to rural development. Economic development is fundamentally hostage to not-good-enough governance.
Karen described a country precariously near the tipping point, a country with natural resources too scarce to support the species that depend on them, a country where time is running out. And it’s only getting worse. Climate change and land grabbing (the massive acquisition of land for biofuels and export agriculture) are only just beginning, and USAID’s ability to commit to long-term aid is questionable.
What can we do? Freudenberg presented the audience with three unsavory options. 1. Forget it. 2. Keep on track and do more of the same, but better. Increase funding and reorganize geographical focus areas. 3. Do not settle for anything other than international consensus that this rainforest must be conserved by whatever means necessary. This may mean the gathering of huge funds which could provide each individual Malagasy citizen with immediate and concrete economic incentive not to burn down any further acreage. This money inflow would have no planned endpoint. And would it even work? No one can know.
Written by Claire Lafave, CES Research Assistant
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