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Forest and Labor in Madagascar

From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere

Indiana University Press

Geographies of Borrowed Time

On June 13, 2010, a story about the plunder of rosewood trees out of several national parks in Madagascar made the cover of the New York Times (Bearak 2010). Not only Malagasy citizens but also international readers concerned about biodiversity protection had been following the story for several months, ever since the coup d'état of the previous March that ousted the pro-conservation and pro—United States president, Marc Ravalomanana, and left Madagascar's hinterlands open to a new scramble for Madagascar's untapped resources: A new wave of imperialist expansion, now launched from the East rather than Europe.

A ring of Chinese and Malagasy merchants, dubbed the "rosewood mafia" in news reports, armed gangs of "thugs" to intimidate residents and park guards around the rain forests that line the northeastern Antongil Bay. The "Timber Barons," as they are also called, having Malagasy names such as Bematana, Bezokiny, and Body, and Chinese ones such as Chan Hoy Lane and Sam Som Miock, infiltrated major towns on the east coast (Wilmé et al. 2009). They hired local villagers for dirt-cheap wages and shipped in extra hands from "deep China" (Gerety 2009a). North American and European expatriates were flown out to safer havens. Conservation activities ceased while local officials, colluding with the Timber Barons, gave the loggers free rein in the national parks.

These activities continue as I write this introduction in spring of 2011. The work gangs of rosewood loggers forge deeper into the forests of Antsiranana Province. It all started at Makira, a national park that was created in 2006, marking a triumphant moment for conservation advocates in Madagascar who had for years been pushing for the expansion of protected areas. Back then when he was a few years into his term, President Ravalomanana promised to do just that. But with devastating irony, the timber merchants, not the conservation organizations, seized the remnant isles of rain forest to convert timber, rather than the experience of tree-filled parks, into cash.

Gangs of loggers fell the majestic trees with handheld saws, then roll them over the steep and knobby forest floor. They lash them to rafts and float them downriver toward the ports. Most of the timber is shipped to China, feeding the desire of a growing Chinese middle class for Ming dynasty reproductions (Garety 2009). It is also coveted for its sonic properties, for the "thickness and creaminess" it lends to the tone of a Gibson guitar (Hunter 2007). Some enterprising types have sought extra money poaching lemurs, birds, tenrecs, and other game from the national parks. In 2010, photographs of a pile of taut and blackened lemur corpses were posted on environmental websites (Bourton 2009). Although it was reported that restaurants in Madagascar sell this new delicacy, I later learned that most of the meat is consumed by loggers sleeping in rough encampments in the park's interior. For Western readers, the images of endangered species-turned-bush meat add ghastly detail to the rosewood debacle, bringing to mind Edward Said's insights that cultural difference, repulsive or strange to the Westerner, need say no more to establish otherness. Through implicit juxtaposition, the Orient can be "made to serve as an illustration of a particular form of eccentricity ... a grotesquerie of a special kind" (Said 1979:103).

Fairly rapidly, the loggers moved southward to Mananara-Nord, my field site, where over the course of fourteen months between 2000 and 2002, I traced the steps and recorded the words of resident Betsimisaraka men employed by an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) at one of UNESCO's global biosphere reserves. Current events have put my historical ethnography of conservation labor in a different light and grammatical tense than it might have otherwise been were it not for the incursions of the Timber Barons and the interruption of conservation activities there. Insofar as a historical ethnography of forest conservation and low-wage labor helps to make sense of a particular situation in Madagascar, it may also help make sense of why editors at the New York Times might assume that their readership would care about the looting of Malagasy rosewood and poaching of endangered lemurs.

This book charts a materialist history of biodiversity conservation around the Antongil Bay from the beginning of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first—that is, from the onset of French colonial rule in 1896 to the beginning of Ravalomanana's ill-fated presidency in 2002. It grounds the discourse of species loss and salvation in the tasks and structure of conservation work. At the center of this story is a class of laborer known as a "conservation agent," the official title given to manual workers of ICDPs in Madagascar during the time of conservation's resurgence in the mid-1980s.

Conservation agents are responsible for the physical tasks of protecting biodiversity. Over the course of my stay in the Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve, conservation agents of Mananara-Nord, all of whom were male, monitored the boundaries of the biosphere reserve's protected areas, including a marine reserve and a rain forest reserve. They reported on rule-breakers, catalogued species inside the park, groomed footpaths, built park infrastructure, disseminated conservation rules and practices among villagers, and eventually became guides of tourists and foreign scientists in the reserves. I compare conservation agents to their structural counterparts of French colonial rule (1896–1960), an era that had been primed by the internal colonization and subjugation of most of the island by Merina rulers until their defeat by French forces. The Merina, as well as Betsileo people, are Malagasy ethnic groups whose natal territory comprises the High Plateau region. Since Madagascar's independence from France in 1960, Merina people have virtually monopolized state offices, even though former president Didier Ratsiraka, who held on to state power for nearly twenty-five years, is Betsimisaraka.

The scramble for precious hardwood along the east coast has made it unsafe for the conservation agents I knew to do their work. I imagine them now tending to their own farm plots, gardens, and households, waiting things out while the coup regime headed by Andry Rajoelina remains unrecognized by other nation-states and complicit in shaping the volatile atmosphere of illegal logging. Conservation representatives of Madagascar are optimistic that order will be eventually restored, but the ecological damage inflicted so far will have further jeopardized innumerable species' lives and human livelihoods. What will become of Madagascar's diverse habitats and societies over the next decade and beyond will depend on the nature of the new state, on the state of ecological devastation, and on the interest, trust, and labor time of rural people who live on what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005:32) calls the "salvage frontier," a space "where making, saving, and destroying resources are utterly mixed up, where zones of conservation, production, and resource sacrifice overlap almost fully, and canonical time frames of nature's study, use, and preservation are reversed, conflated, and confused."

By examining in one place the exchange between people and nonhuman nature, this book throws light on a general process that takes place everywhere, but always under particular conditions and in specific modalities. This is not just a history of the making of nature through labor or of labor through nature, but one that enjoins the mutual formation of people and nature through the process of transforming a specific space at a particular time. This takes not just time, but time formed by a specific history of a particular place.

LABOR AND PROTECTED AREAS

In the mid-1980s, Western donors launched a plan to protect the island's biodiversity through economic liberalization after nearly a decade of socialist policy. Donors' prioritization of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development transformed Madagascar's job market. Well-educated job seekers with skills in agronomy, ecology, participatory methods, and community development found employment in a growing array of international NGOs and agencies devoted to conservation and development.

The international interest in Madagascar's biodiversity loss was not new. Forest and soil conservation had preoccupied the French colonial state since at least the 1920s, and even earlier if one takes into account Governor-General Gallieni's experimentation with the cultivation of native tree species soon after he arrived in Madagascar in 1896 to organize the new colony. French officials were already seeing the ecological devastations of projects of mise en valeur ("valorization," or bringing land under capitalist production). Conceding the follies of repressive conservation policies that mimicked colonial-era efforts and repeatedly failed to get peasants to stop slashing and burning the rain forest to grow rice—a practice known in Madagascar as tavy—neoliberal planners rejected a unilateral, top-down model of prioritysetting in favor of a more people-friendly approach. This consisted mainly in meetings between conservation project workers and villagers, where villagers could voice their preferences in the services (e.g., veterinary, health, nutrition) they desired or the structures they wanted to see fixed or built, such as bridges and schools. In exchange for these local development activities, in which villagers were expected to volunteer their labor and provide a portion of building materials, villagers would agree to respect the rules forbidding them to clear forest or harvest timber or endemic species from legally protected areas.

By and large, Malagasy peasants have not, over the past twenty-odd years, applauded the new approach to conservation, especially after the funds from tourist ticket fees that were supposed to go toward community development in the early 1990s were slashed, once the state and donors realized that they could not afford to give up 50 percent of tourism revenue for the nascent park service. With some exceptions, notably through a hopeful initiative in community-based forest management, Malagasy peasants on the east coast have continued to resent and resist conservation efforts. This has made the employment of local residents as conservation agents problematic. Locally hired people, as insiders, possess knowledge and social connections that are essential to the conservation effort, yet their sense of duty to the ICDP is often compromised by their loyalties and pragmatic strategies to offset the economic insecurity of conservation work with subsistence labor.

In tropical regions such as Madagascar, scholars and conservation practitioners have identified and sought to assuage conflicts between local populations and environmental projects. The scholarship on "people and parks," or conservation interventions in the global South, flourished shortly after big development institutions repackaged foreign aid to conform to the vision of environmentally sustainable development outlined in The Brundtland Commission's Report (1987) (see Neumann 1998; Harper 2002; Brockington 2002; Igoe 2003; Walley 2004; Haenn 2005; Lowe 2006; West 2006; West et al. 2006). Anthropologists Paige West, Jim Igoe, and Dan Brockington (2006) synthesize and draw out the common themes of studies of the peopleparks dynamic up to their article's publication date. These have been significantly informed by the theoretical perspective of political ecology, what Aletta Biersack succinctly defines as an approach investigating "how power relations mediate human-environment relations" (Biersack 2006:3). The by-now familiar framework of "people versus parks" has illuminated diverse sources of conflict between conservation authorities and "targets" of policy interventions, as well as the negative social effects of conservation schemes in biodiversity hot spots.

A burgeoning literature in social science turns attention to the relationship between capitalism and environmental protection, as featured in a 2010 issue of the geographical journal Antipode. Such studies examine the emergent partnerships between private corporations and conservation organizations, the political significance of capitalizing intact or semi-restored landscapes, and the application of a capitalist logic to the mission of biodiversity protection (MacDonald 2010). Newer studies also document the trend in ecological economics of setting monetary values on ecosystemic services thereby strategically submitting conservation to "'free market' processes" (Igoe et al. 2010:488). This includes analyses of the social and economic dimensions of the global initiative Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Erosion (REDD+), launched in 2005, which entails an international cooperation in mitigating the effects of carbon and other emissions attributed to the disappearance of forest.

My intervention into the political ecology of conservation centers on the role of manual labor in creating the value of endemic tropical species within industrialized metropolitan centers. Labor is a conceptual lens through which to examine the effects of hierarchy, differential compensation, resistance, and acquiescence on the creation of value. I concentrate on the people at the lowest levels of the social hierarchy in Madagascar—what I call subaltern labor—to expose the mundane tasks that have made possible the acquisition of certain types of knowledge, and the evolution of certain philosophies of nature. The workers who do all the grunt work of protecting animals, plants, coral reefs, and rain forest from extinction have been virtually invisible in accounts of what has failed and what has worked in conservation efforts. Their obscurity reinforces the view that the conservation of nature, like women's domestic labor, like Mother Nature herself, is "an antithesis of human productive activity" (Smith 1990:368). The idea that conservation is a palliative to extractive activities in the rain forest has only shrouded the contributions of subaltern workers who have prepared the grounds for Westerners' romanticization, exploitation, discovery, and salvation of tropical wilderness (see White 1996:171; Slater 2002). This idea of conservation furthermore assumes the preexistence of intrinsic value in nature: conservation does not create value but protects an a priori value and accumulates it by enabling biodiversity to proliferate.

In the early 1990s, the conservation agent, a locally hired extension agent of sorts, represented a new kind of worker-peasant in peripheral, tropical economies. This class of worker-peasant, like a civil servant, had to enforce environmental legislation, but more than that he was expected through his words and deeds to spread conservationist ideology to members of his own ilk. The responsibilities were all out of proportion to the actual numbers of conservation agents employed by ICDPs. At Mananara-Nord over the course of my research, there was a median of ten men (accounting for resignations and the time lag of new hires) to patrol 140,000 hectares of biosphere reserve. The reserve was overseen at the time by a Dutch representative of UNESCO and his Malagasy counterpart, whose title was national director. The site was the first of UNESCO's biosphere reserves in Madagascar, as well as the first ICDP on the island.

Manual conservation workers, trying to make ends meet with wages that do not in themselves cover household food needs and expenses, while also pressured to maintain harmonious relations in the village, and always threatened with the sudden loss of employment, had to stay active in the subsistence economy of tavy as recipients of rice cultivated by kin members, or as cultivators themselves. The contradiction of transnational conservation efforts in Madagascar is that emplaced, low-wage workers engage in the moral economy of tavy, the land use most blamed for whittling away the rain forest.

The analysis of conservation as productive labor attends to the tensions internal to the labor structure of neoliberal conservation and development efforts, thereby shifting attention askance of the "people versus park" dynamic. I am interested in the ways in which rural Malagasy workers have pushed back against what they view as overreaching by "outside" capital, including conservation and development entities. Yet these agrarian workers that have been incorporated into neoliberal conservation and development have also guardedly assimilated key principles of conservation, since they are directly impacted by ecological changes, such as the increase of flooding, the depletion of soils, land scarcity, and the decrease in wild protein sources. They also recognize that many of today's conservation and development practitioners (the expatriate experts and project managers, and the Merina consultants and extension agents, for example) are aware of and sympathetic to the constraints faced by the rural poor who practice tavy. The focus on conservation labor therefore underscores the fact that Malagasy conservation agents are not merely sympathetic to rural populations but are also in the same boat.

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Excerpted from Forest and Labor in Madagascar by Genese Marie Sodikoff. Copyright © 2012 Genese Marie Sodikoff. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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