Mankind Poses Grave Threat to Madagascar’s Unique Flora and Fauna

This island off the East African coast is to today’s naturalists what the Galapagos Islands off South America were to Charles Darwin, a study in evolution.

But the island’s unique and diverse plant and animal life is under grave threat as man continues to torch the forest to clear the land in what one newspaper calls a kind of “national pyromania.”

As a result, heading off the destruction of Madagascar’s fragile habitat has become the premier goal of many international environmental groups.

After Madagascar split from the African mainland more than 150 million years ago, its plants and animals went on their own evolutionary course.

Some became extinct, like the pygmy hippopotamus, elephant bird and giant lemurs.

“There was a tremendous explosion of different forms from very, very few ancestors,” said Dr. Martin Nicoll, a zoologist who represents the World Wildlife Fund here. “Madagascar lets you look at the limits of adaptability.

“You can make really nice biological comparisons. What do plants have to do, for example, to live in a desert?”

Madagascar’s terrain ranges from rain forests to prairie to desert.

Ninety percent of the plant and animal species on the 226,658-square mile island are found nowhere else: from the lovable lemurs to hundreds of species of orchids and more than 350 species of amphibians and reptiles.

There are 29 species of lemurs, primates whose name comes from the Latin word for ghosts because of their largely nocturnal habits. The closest living descendants of the common ancestor of humans, monkeys and apes, lemurs were displaced by monkeys elsewhere in the world. Here they had a chance to survive in isolation.

Madagascar’s equivalent of the woodpecker is a lemur called an aye-aye. It detects insect larvae moving in decaying trees with its sharp ears and then uses a skinny middle finger to reach in and pull them out.

The largest lemur is the indri, a black-and-white creature that weighs about 15 pounds at adulthood and can leap 20 feet from treetop to treetop.

The indris, whose haunting calls are reminiscent of sounds emitted by great whales, are the main attraction for the small but growing number of tourists who visit this small reserve about 60 miles east of the capital of Antananarivo.

A short walk through a rain forest, led by a guide, inevitably turns up a family of the indris, staring down with their Teddy bear-like faces, bemused but not much interested in their visitors.

The humans, whose slash-and-burn agricultural methods now threaten wildlife and the nation’s watershed, are late arrivals, coming from Africa and the Malay Archipelago only 1,500 years ago. Fourteen species of lemurs have become extinct since humans arrived, and ecologists fear that others are in danger of joining them.

The island’s population has more than doubled since 1950, and now exceeds 11 million. Farmers are so desperate for land they are felling trees on 70-degree slopes. Four-fifths of the island’s land is barren, and its forests have been reduced by half in the last three decades.

The government’s agriculture department long encouraged farmers to cut trees and burn the stumps to clear the ground for cash crops. The savanna is burned to produce tender shoots for an estimated 10 million zebu cattle.

“In the West and in the East, not far from the capital, the fires continue to burn,” said U.S. Ambassador Patricia Gates Lynch. “Sometimes you see the smoke trapped right here in the city.”

The government and environmental organizations are working together now to discourage slash-and-burn land clearing, though the education process is slow.

“It’s primarily a human problem,” Prime Minister Victor Ramahatra said. “We must teach people that the natural environment is their principal source of wealth.”

The government has shifted course from the policies adopted in a 1975 socialist revolution and now follows the advice of Western donors on economic policy. But a U.S. Embassy economic report says no economic reforms will work in the long run “without corrective action against Madagascar’s single greatest self-inflicted problem: the destruction of its environment.”

The government also has broken out of the virtual self-imposed isolation since President Didier Ratsiraka came to power in 1975.

Nicoll says the government has cooperated with environmental groups since the end of 1985. “It is our No. 1 conservation priority,” he said.

A recent issue of the daily newspaper Midi said an average of 3.7 million acres of land was being burned each year. Midi, an independent journal, likened the burning to “national pyromania.”

Some peasants reportedly continue to burn the land to show their displeasure with the steady decline in the nation’s economy since the revolution. Per capita income declined 24% between 1979 and 1983.

Destructive Erosion

The denuded hillsides are no match for heavy rains and occasional cyclones. Great holes are carved in the landscape by erosion. The Indian Ocean north of the island is red from the red clay soil washed out to sea.

The World Bank is organizing an international effort to halt the degradation, which it estimates will cost from $300 million to $400 million over the next 15 to 20 years.

Already 11 major projects aided by Western environmental groups, universities and governments are under way. They include efforts to save existing reserves and plans to create new reserves or national parks.

Nicoll, whose WWF is managing projects covering 10 reserves, said efforts have to take into consideration the needs of the people who live nearby.

“The people don’t want to cut down the forest just because it’s there,” said Yale University anthropologist Eleanor Sterling, who is studying the aye-aye. “They truly need the wood for firewood or for land for agriculture. Many of them understand the problems in the environment and would like to do something to help, but they have to feed their children.”

People Accept Change

Nicoll says the success of the Perinet reserve proves people can be persuaded to change.

“I was there in 1985, during my first long-term stay in Madagascar,” he said. “When you’d go into the reserve you’d meet people walking along with an ax. Just about every day you’d hear the chop, chop of an ax. You never hear that now. Tourism has done that. Tourism has put that place into a sort of protected status. Nobody would dare go in there now with an ax.”

Western organizations are pushing tourism, which up to now only brings a few thousand people to the island, many of them bird watchers or naturalists.