Not-so-wild Madagascar

It’s just over 90 miles from Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, to Andasibe National Park on Route Nationale 2 (RN2), the highway to Toamasina, the main port on the east coast. If the weather is clear and the traffic light, you can reach Andasibe in two hours; for my colleagues and I, traveling to a UNICEF seminar, our outbound and return trips both took three hours. Trucks hauling fuel and containers wheezed up the hills; every few miles, we came across one stranded by the roadside, its driver sprawled across the open engine, or the trailer precariously jacked up, teetering on the edge of a cliff. Almost all freight to the capital and highlands is transported on this road. The single-line railroad the French colonial government built along the route could carry heavy freight, but the truck owners’ cartel has put pressure on the politicians to withhold funding for maintenance and the track has fallen into disrepair. We saw only one train.

From Antananarivo’s so-called ring road, the surreally named Boulevard de Tokyo (presumably built with Japanese aid), RN2 rises through the hills. The rice paddies stretch out over the bottom lands and the lower slopes of hills where farmers build terraces; water flows from springs into the terraces and then, through channels or pipes, where flow is controlled by sluice gates, to the lower paddies. In the fields, wood-fired brick kilns stand like sentries, and large stacks of rough red-mud bricks line the roadside; in several places, the granite outcrops have been gouged to quarry stone for road and home construction.  

As RN2 descends from the highland escarpment, the hills on either side are clear cut or covered with second-growth eucalyptus forest. A hundred years ago, old-growth forest extended over much of the highlands and northeast, but most has been destroyed by slash-and-burn agriculture and the cutting of timber for charcoal, firewood and home construction; perhaps as much as 90 per cent of the island’s original forest has been lost. The French planted the fast-growing eucalyptus to provide fuel for the railroad and steam engines used on plantations, and today these trees are the main source of charcoal. It is estimated that 95 per cent of Malagasy households, including those in urban areas, use firewood or charcoal for cooking and heating. Along RN2, the trees are cut down to their stumps, and the wood slowly burned in earth ovens to produce charcoal. Sacks are piled by the roadside; the local price is about $2, making it worth the trip to transport charcoal to Tana where it fetches $6 a sack. The eucalyptus stumps soon sprout again, but it is a stubby new growth. Any wildlife that once lived in these forests has fled or been hunted. Only in the protected areas of the national parks do the eucalyptus trees and native varieties grow high, providing shelter and food for wildlife.

Today, mining poses a deeper threat to the environment. For many years, foreign investors shied away from Madagascar, deterred by political instability, corruption and poor infrastructure. What was the point in building a mine or factory if the politicians were going to nationalize it or grab the profits? Or if there were no roads, reliable power supply and skilled workforce? Recently, multinational mining companies have started to exploit the vast and largely untapped resources. At Moramanga, the Ambatovy nickel and cobalt mine, built by a Canadian-Japanese-Korean consortium at a cost of US$8 billion, claims to be the largest-ever foreign investment in the country and one of the largest lateritic nickel mines in the world. The ore is strip-mined and sent to a preparation plant; the nickel and cobalt ore slurry is then piped underground for 136 miles to a processing plant and refinery south of Toamasina where it is separated and loaded onto ships.

Critics say the government granted the mining license with minimal study of its potential impact. Rather than employing and training local people, the company brought in a foreign workforce (mostly South Asian and Filipino) to build the mine and pipeline. The influx of foreign workers and money transformed Moramanga, a regional market center, into a boom town, its streets lined with import shops, hotels, restaurants and karaoke bars. Rents soared, forcing local people to move out of town. Crime and prostitution levels increased, with teachers reporting that most teenage girls had dropped out of school. There was more money to be made working the streets than working the rice paddies. That went for the men as well as the women. The streets of Moramanga are crowded with brightly-painted pousse-pousse bicycle rickshaws. The drivers, who rent their machines by the day, must hustle hard to make money. 

The tourism industry, while less destructive than mining, is changing the country in other ways. There are two types of tourists. One heads for the beaches and tropical islands; there are direct flights from Paris to Nosy Be (Big Island), the largest and most developed resort area off the northwest coast. The tourists never see the urban sprawl and poverty of Antananarivo, or the rural central highlands. The second type comes to see the lemurs and other wildlife in the national parks. They stay at tastefully designed lodges with manicured gardens where diesel generators provide back-up power, the showers always have hot water, the juice is freshly squeezed, and the buffet offers a mix of European and Malagasy dishes. Andasibe National Park has half a dozen lodges catering to foreign tourists who come in small parties (no large buses) and sit at dinner tables reserved for “Wild Madagascar” or “Jungle Adventure.” Then they go off to see the lemurs. 

My colleagues and I did too, on an afternoon break from our UNICEF workshop. You don’t have to venture too far into the jungle to find your photographic prey. At the Wakona Lodge, most lemurs live on a small island in a river (a 30-second canoe paddle from the parking lot). They do not hide in trees but bound out of the undergrowth to greet you, climbing on your head or shoulders in the hopes you brought bananas. This is wildlife at its most accessible. Most of these lemurs were donated by people in Toamasina who had kept them as pets. I’m sure they’re happier living on the island than in cages but calling this “Wild Madagascar” seems a stretch. However, it’s enough for many tourists who don’t want to walk too far to get their photographs. They can go home with stories of the jungle and make donations to wildlife charities to protect Madagascar’s biodiversity. They may not think much about the people of Madagascar or economic or social conditions. The national statistics for poverty, health, education, safe water and other indicators are woeful, but also tedious and easy to ignore, especially for tourists on jungle tours. Poor people are not nearly as cuddly as lemurs.

The best road in Madagascar

It’s officially 923 km (577 miles) from Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital in the central highlands, to Toliara, the main port on the southwest coast, on Route Nationale (RN) 7. All the guidebooks (and every Malagasy I’ve met) say that RN7 is the best road in the country.  It’s all relative, I guess.  I’d classify RN7, a two-lane highway with many one-lane bridges, as a superior county road in Ohio or West Virginia, or maybe a lesser state route in need of maintenance. Yet, for better or worse (mostly for worse), this is the main route to the south. And it doesn’t even go all the way. The southernmost port and city, Tolananro (Fort Dauphin), is another two days’ travel from Toliara on dirt roads (which also have at least the official status of Route Nationales), bone rattling in the dry season and impassable in the rainy season.

With Air Madagascar on strike, the only way for me to reach Toliara, where I was scheduled to run a workshop for UNICEF, was on RN7.  We left Antananarivo’s airport mid-afternoon on Saturday and had to spend two nights on the road before reaching Toliara on Monday morning.

Driving on RN7, it sometimes seemed that half the country was on the move. By taxi-brousse (bush taxi), the minivans with luggage, bicycles and the ubiquitous yellow bidons (jerry cans used for carrying water) piled so high that they look as if they will tip over on a curve (they sometimes do).  By auto and bicycle rickshaw.  By bicycle.  On carts pulled by zebu, the humped cattle used for every agricultural task and (with fish) the main source of protein for the population.  Every hour or so we stopped to let a herd of zebu cross the road, the boy herders shouting and waving their sticks.  Outside the towns and villages, there were always people walking along the road.  Rice farmers going to and from their fields. Men with axes and long sticks with curved blades, cutting eucalyptus trees for firewood and charcoal.  Children returning from the river with bidons, lashed onto wooden push-carts, the day’s supply of water for cooking and washing.  Families walking home from church.

Of course, most people in central and southern Madagascar were not on the move. It’s just that those who were traveling were squeezed onto the narrow ribbon of RN7. Outside the towns, I saw only two east-west roads leading off RN7 with a tarmac surface, and who knows how far it went?  The poor infrastructure—primarily the roads, but also rural electricity supply—is the major barrier to economic development in a country where most people are still subsistence farmers, and which lags behind most countries (even many African countries) on human development indicators for health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education. Every rainy season, landslips block the road, and sections wash away, or develop huge potholes. Each administration in this notoriously politically unstable country promises to fix the roads and extend the network but, faced with poverty, hunger and pressing social problems, the promises are soon forgotten. “You can’t eat roads,” remarked our driver dryly.

South of Fianarantsoa, the second largest city, RN7 turns southwest, dipping down out of the highlands to the treeless savanna grasslands.  This is Madagascar’s High Plains country, where herders drive their zebus and sleep out under the stars.  If it wasn’t for the distinctive red and white kilometer posts on the roadside and the absence of pick-up trucks, it could be Wyoming or the Dakotas, the long grass blowing in the wind, the mountain ranges on the horizon.  The grasslands gradually give way to a desert landscape dotted with scrubby trees and cactus, reminiscent of the American Southwest.  

The wealth in this beautiful but desolate landscape is definitely in them, thar hills—in this case it’s not gold, but sapphires.  Migrants from all over the country have come to this region to seek their fortunes, digging into the hillsides with shovels and pickaxes. They live in rough, single-story shacks in a series of small towns that straggle RN7.  The real wealth is controlled by foreign traders—mostly from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Thailand—who buy the rough sapphires and sell them, mostly for export.   The names on the gem stores tell the story—Fayez, Najeem, Iqbal, Farook.  These are reportedly wild towns, with high rates of crime and prostitution, where the lucky miner who has just sold his sapphires blows it all on sugar-cane moonshine and the slots at Les Jokers Hotel and Karaoke Bar. 

The final 100 km to Toliara is desolate, and the people poor. In contrast to the rough but functional two-story houses of the highlands, the villages consist of single-room mud huts with thatched roofs and fences of branches and cactus, their occupants literally scratching out a living from the dry, sandy soil.  Finally, we glimpsed the sea in the distance and crossed the low sandy hills into Toliara.  We made it to the Chamber of Commerce just in time for the mid-morning coffee break.  And just in time—my first presentation was on the schedule for right after the break.