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 percent 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 is 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.
Since 2005, the British-Australian company Rio Tinto has invested almost $1 billion in an operation near Fort Dauphin (Taolagnaro) on the south coast to mine ilmenite, which is used to make titanium dioxide, the white pigment commonly found in paint, toothpaste, and cosmetics. Global demand has been growing, especially in China and India, and the Rio Tinto mine—20 percent owned by the government—was expected to give a major boost to the economy and provide jobs in one of the poorest regions of the country. From the start, the project was mired in controversy. No agricultural land was available to compensate those who gave up land for the mine, so the company paid them in cash. Construction created a temporary employment boom, but when production began in 2009, few jobs were available. Critics claim only 10 percent of employees are locals; Rio Tinto says it’s 70 percent. Whatever the real number is, mining transformed the local economy. Hotels sold out for two years, ruining the local tourist business. Sex workers spread STDs. And people who had been living on less than $1 a day suddenly had more money than they would previously have seen in a year. Some used it to set up small businesses, but most failed. “People were buying cars, TVs, generators, drinking,” one construction worker recalled. “It was like a party every day.”
The party ended violently in January 2013 when several hundred protesters armed with spears and slingshots blocked the mine access road, complaining about high unemployment, corruption, and inadequate compensation for landowners. For a time, the company’s chief executive and 178 staff were trapped inside the compound. Eventually, troops using tear gas dispersed the crowd. The protests made Rio Tinto wary of future investment; it shelved plans for a second, and larger, mine in nearby St. Luce.1
Madagascar’s other major mining operation is off RN2 near Moramanga, the site of the massacre of prisoners during the 1947 rebellion. The Ambatovy nickel and cobalt mine, built by a Canadian-Japanese-Korean consortium at a cost of $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 boomtown, 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 Tana, 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 backup 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.
We did too, on an afternoon break from the 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 thirty-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.
Jungle Prisoner of Sociological Theory
The UA sociology professor leaned across the table. “I’d really like to talk about Max Weber,” he whispered. As session chair, I weighed my options. I could say no and risk a minor academic diplomatic incident. I could feign an apology, claim it was time for the coffee break and hope he would not remind me later. Instead I did the diplomatic and, in hindsight, the right thing. I surrendered to sociological theory. “Mais bien sûr [but of course],” I said.
I wondered how he was going to connect Weber’s antipositivism to childhood vaccination rates, school enrollments, the building of latrines, or any of the topics UNICEF had selected for the session. I need not have worried. In his ten-minute monologue he made no reference to the practical research issues on the agenda.
My colleagues and I knew that working with the UA faculty would require patience and tact. Looking back, I’m sure the UA faculty felt the same about us. It was not only the language barrier. The main challenge was that most of the UA faculty had a traditional French academic background that emphasizes theory and language over practice. They had little experience in the applied research that can help a development agency such as UNICEF improve health or education. Weber does not offer guidance on how to persuade people to use latrines or wash their hands before eating.
We felt frustrated. Our colleagues seemed more interested in discussing theoretical issues than in hashing out topics and questions for the study. It was tough for the interpreters, grappling with three-way simultaneous translation—Malagasy to English, French to English, and English to French. The day reached a low point when I heard this through my headphones: “The real problem is situated somewhere between the problematic and the problematization.”
We felt like prisoners in a jungle of theory. I thought briefly about running off into the real jungle to hang out with the lemurs. Yet over the next few months, we came to realize that the lecture on Weber and other apparent diversions into Marxist, literary, or linguistic theory were not academic posturing.
