Mandoro Tanety

Up to this point I’ve primarily told stories of events happening in my day to day.  Little occurrences I find amusingly absurd or anecdotes of my exploits as I’ve settled into life and work in Arivonimamo.  While what I’ve exposed thus far has been accurate, I haven’t painted an entirely fair picture of life here in Madagascar. 

Most of what I’ve communicated has reflected the overwhelmingly positive experience I’m having living and working in my community, but what I’ve failed to include is that my life here have been cast against the backdrop of a country that’s burning itself to the ground.  I’ll leave an explanation of the political crisis, along with the plethora of other issues plaguing Madagascar, until another time.  Right now though, I want to write about ‘mandoro tanety.’ Though my environmental knowledge and jargon might be lacking, I need to explain how the scorched earth policy some Malagasy individuals perpetuate savagely counteracting efforts to develop this country and protect its precious eco-system. 

The burned earth is a phenomenon that almost anyone visiting Madagascar will come into contact with, whether consciously or unconsciously.   A visitor to Madagascar experiences an inescapable immersion in the country’s multitude of diverse ecological systems, home to an array of flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth.  Ripped from India and Africa thousands of years ago, the country evolved in relative isolation until the first inhabitants crossed the Indian Ocean from Malaysia.  Even following the first inhabitance by humans, muted exploitation from isolated coastal villages failed to penetrate the deeper regions of the island and the country’s environment flourished for centuries.

While a visitor to Madagascar can still experience the staggering natural beauty this island has to offer, they may not realize that what they’re seeing is a skeleton of what used to be.  It’s a country whose greatest natural asset is dying, and in many cases the body is still warm and a discerning eye can pick out the open wounds. There are innumerable environmental threats, animal poaching, illegal rosewood harvest, effectively unregulated mining endeavors by international corporations, but the one that most directly impacts my town in addition to pervading the rest of the island, is when people mandoro tanety.

Mandoro is the Malagasy word for ‘to burn,’ and Tanety is one of the many words that Malagasy people use for grass, or land.  Driving through sections of the country one will often see vast expanses of land and hillsides covered in short grass and dotted with trees.  Some of this is natural grassland but much of it is land that has been deforested and then burned, frequently for timber use and then preparation for eventual use as farmland.  This practice has left large swaths of Madagascar’s once densely forested areas execrably barren.  The nation’s rivers now run red with the soil refuse bleeding into them, a product of erosion precipitated by deforestation. 

The reasons for burning of the land are difficult to wrap one’s head around.  It’s one of the points I harp on most frequently when I meet new people and strike up conversation.  Why do people burn the land?  What do they gain?  One rationale posited by those with a more academic inclination: the persistence of a ‘short-term gain’ fixation, born of a lack of education and exacerbated by the desperation a subsistence existence can engender.  Supposedly, the burning of a stretch of land produces a good deal of nitrogen which subsequently seeps into the soil and produces a fertile patch of land for the following year’s harvest.  Following that harvest however, the land is ruined for years and must sit desolate before the soil can regenerate and hope to sustain life beyond simple grasses.  Purportedly farmers will clear the trees, burn the land, plant a crop, harvest it, and then leave the patch of pillaged earth in favor of another.  The wide-spread application of this practice has left Madagascar traversed by sizeable fields of scarred earth, that any visitor will be compelled to notice.

It has also been suggested that mandoro tanety is a form of political protest.  A way for average citizens to draw attention to their dissatisfaction with the current regime by setting fire to one of the nation’s most precious assets, the environment.  This is one of the most disturbing explanations I’ve come across.  As far as I can tell, it makes about as much of an impact on the government as screaming underwater would on anyone floating up above.  Consequently Madagascar burns and any political statement that intends falls on deaf ears.  Here in the region of Itasy, as is likely the case in other regions as well, the devastation has been two-fold.  Concurrent to the environmental degradation is the economic toll the fires exact on the economic livelihoods of a population heavily dependent upon the byproducts of that environment.  The famed Tapia forests, home to a type of silk worm found only here in Madagascar, and most notably around my town, Arivonimamo, are being consumed by the fires.  Silk weavers whom I work with have expressed concern that the price of their raw materials are rising as a result of a decreased supply of silk cocoons.  The primary cause of this contraction in supply is, you guessed it, the burning of the forests. 

I’ve also witnessed the expanses of freshly blackened land on my 14 km bike ride to the village of Ambohitrambo where the youth fruit drying cooperative is located.  On one of these journeys I was with my friend Jean Claude, the president of the cooperative, so I posed the question to him: why on earth would the Malagasy people do such a thing? The answer: ‘tsy misy ampy saina.’ Which means: ‘there aren’t enough brains.’  Or in blunt terms, the people who burn the land are a bunch of idiots.  Almost all of the Malagasy people I talk to are dismayed by those who mandoro tanety, but no one seems to have an answer. To most people it appears to be a tragic yet inevitable fact of life in Madagascar.

   

A few months back I took a trip to the Northern Sofia region of Madagascar with my counterpart organization Prosperer to observe the working habits of another regional team.  The night we drove back will forever be etched in my mind.  As we drove through the Northern countryside we were enveloped in complete darkness expect for the light of the moon and the pillars of fire dotting the landscape.  I remember staring out the window and seeing immense fields of fire alight on the horizon, the way the electric glow of a small town might light the sky on a night drive through rural America.

I’ve mentioned how deforestation and the burning of land are contributing to erosion, and how it’s turning the rivers red.  I was talking about the issue with the Malagasy woman who heads Peace Corps’ economic development program and our conversation drifted towards talk of airplanes and flying.  She told me that she’ll always remember looking down at the land below as she flew over Madagascar for the first time.  Observing all the trees, the mountains, the stretches of barren landscape and the rivers, and all the while she told me she thought to herself, ‘my god, my country is bleeding.’

Until next time, Veloma.