Here is some frontline reporting from Madagascar about rampant deforestation going on. Mass invasions of protected areas are happening. There are community groups pushing back, but the grinding poverty of the country is overwhelming conservation efforts. Are there any hopeful protected areas of Madagascar where there might still be some lemurs in 100 years? If you want to help conserve Madagascar, now is a good time to jump in. Madagascar's lemurs lurch toward extinction, but there could be a way to save them
Now I feel bad for the amount of times that I have complained about lemurs being to popular in zoos. I guess that they need all of the conservation efforts.
There are many people complaining about 0.7% of GDP being spent on foreign aid in the UK. Protecting Madagascar would be a good use of resources. If the forests are cut down, the resulting land can only be used for a short time and then there could be mass starvation. Whereas, if people could receive decent wages for doing worthwhile jobs, rather than destroying their island and its wildlife, this would benefit everyone. When I visited Madagascar in 1987, my guide showed me a felled forest near Perinet. He said the forest warden was poorly paid and the loggers offered him a relatively large sum of money to cut down trees. It is not surprising that he accepted the money to help his family. If he received more money to protect the forest, rather than to let it be felled, he would have had more incentive to protect it.
The link between poverty and environmental destruction is so strong, it is incredibly frustrating when it is ignored. Forcing conservation on people without lifting them up or giving them alternative methods of supporting themselves is not just ineffective, it's also cruel. The best way to invest money in saving Madagascar's forests? Save Madagascar's people: modernize agriculture, encourage entrepreneurship, develop infrastructure, invest in education. Even if actually doing these things is not straightforward, the benefit and profit of achieving them is. The best way I can think of for people like us to help, besides donating money directly to conservation and development efforts in Madagascar, is to travel there. The more money that foreigners invest in seeing the country and it's wildlife, the more incentive the Malagasy people and government will have to protect it, and the more money they will have to invest in their development efforts.
The problem is that many of those nations are trying to improve themselves and farming is a quick way to generate good international revenue from trade. Furthermore western farming methods and machines and chemicals are all the rage; the west wants to encourage it (new markets for sales of machines and chemicals) whilst at the same time the other nations see that as the way forward. So modernizing is a double edged sword. You could well end up encouraging them to go even bigger with fields! I do fully agree that the best way to protect is by education and awareness and by giving those people a means to support themselves. Ecotourism is the current bubble everyone seems to be pushing for that goal - giving direct value to many species that otherwise might be regarded as pests or a danger to life or simply worthless to people. However its a very fragile approach and requires stable global conditions as well as affluent people willing to pay to travel great distances. It can also backfire and I think its also got issues trying to be applied at the large rather than the local scale. I think its the current popular option also because its also easier to deliver. Trying to change farming practice is harder, for example, because there's many companies with a vested interest in promoting methods that are not a eco-friendly.
The main difference in Madagascar is that it is not really any company doing the main damage, it is the practice of Tavy (slash and burn agriculture) by many small farmers. If you travel along the east coast you will see a lot of secondary growth and hardly rainforest, as with the current population levels tavy is not sustainable at all and creates a lot of worthless scrubland, which most Malagasy species cannot use. The problem is mainly a money issue, as my feeling was that there are a lot of Malagasy people that actually do care, but the political situation over the past years has made any foreign investment rather difficult. Many national parks also seem to be generally well protected, especially for such a poor country, so there is always hope. There was some research published a few years ago that with 32 million USD one could save all lemurs (if my memory serves me well), make it 50-100 million and then it is still not a lot of money...
This quote: so encouraging, yet so frustrating, all at the same time... This also reminded me of a thread and article that VC posted a couple years ago, where Zoos Victoria calculated how much money it would cost to save a number of species they were working with. Here is the thread link here: Victorias zoos saving animals and the article link here: Zoos Victoria puts a price on saving animals from extinction
Some of the latest news on lemur research from the IUCN Madagascar Section: AEECL - Lemur News Publication
