Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere

5. Contracting Space: Making Deals in a Global Hot Spot

Le temps n’est que l’activité de l’espace. —Elsa Triolet, Le Grand Jamais 115 5 Contracting Space Making Deals in a Global Hot Spot The first time I saw Mananara-Nord was in July of 1999, when I made an exploratory visit there with Haja. We went overland from Toamasina, where about fifteen passengers piled into the back of a camion-brousse, a vehicle that the Lonely Planet guidebook describes as an “army style truck fitted with a bench or seats down each side . . . used for particularly long or rough journeys, which you may well wish you had never begun ” (Andrew et al. 2008:284). We sat atop bags of used clothes and rice, and on other people’s legs and elbows, as a torrential rain pummeled the canvas cover, making the interior stifling, and at nightfall pitch-black. Once we passed the river town of Soanierana-Ivongo, Route Nationale 5 became a narrow dirt road. Thirty-six miles separated that town from Mananara-Nord, but the rocks that bulged from the road’s surface, the deep mud slicks, ramshackle bridges, and portions of soft, sandy beach extended those miles into twenty-five hours of driving time. Route Nationale 5 had been neglected for years—at least, people say, since the early years of President Albert Zafy’s term (1993–1996), a brief and hopeful interlude to Didier Ratsiraka’s hold on the state since 1975 that ended with Zafy’s impeachment. There are alternative theories as to why such a major route had been left to deteriorate. Some say Ratsiraka ignored road repairs in retaliation for tepid support among citizens of the northeast coast during the 1996 elections. Others say that the Chinese merchant families who dominate the maritime shipment of cloves, vanilla, and fruit from MananaraNord to the port of Toamasina want to stave off competition by people with trucks. So, people say, the Chinese made deals with Ratsiraka’s ministers to keep the road nearly impassable and their boats in business. 116 For est and La bor in Ma dagascar The road skirted the coast—to the east, the Antongil Bay; to the west, a vista of ravinala palms and green rolling mountains. It cut through villages of ravinala-leaf and plank houses, as well as occasional herds of zebu cattle being corralled to new pastures. Northward, the mouths of seven rivers, too wide for bridges, required wooden rafts to ferry vehicles across. Moving northward, the vegetation began to thicken, and the road hugged the shoreline. Just after we crossed the seventh river, in the village of Anove, a sign staked on the side of the road announced our entry into the UNESCO’s Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve. This was the first clue we were entering a new space being designed, in Arturo Escobar’s (1997:210) words, to “deliver nature from the grip of destructive practices and establish in its stead a conservationist culture.” Planners of neoliberal conservation pinned hopes on future revenue from the capitalization of intact nature, a form of “reprimarization,” or “a return to a reliance on primary export products,” which, according to Fernando Coronil, has reauthorized metropolitan control over postcolonial societies (Coronil 2000:363). In Mananara-Nord, the production of cloves and vanilla, conventional objects of reprimarization, competed with a reliance on the emergent form of reprimarization, or the commodification of whole ecosystems through conservation and ecotourism, as well as through the conversion of rain forests into rentearning research sites for scientists. Breaching the stage of conventional manufacture, the nonextractive production of rain forest value enacts a “compression” of time and space. David Harvey’s (1990) concept of “time-space compression”—an outcome of the evolution of capitalism which today includes the simultaneity of the new information technologies, high speed transportation , transnational production processes, and the accelerating turnover time of production and the circulation of exchange—describes a transformation of the subjective experience of the world. As Noel Castree (2009:35) explains, “people register cognitively and emotionally the increased pace of change and the enhanced capacity of far-distant places to impact on their own lives instantaneously.” Conservation proponents express a low-grade anxiety at the acceleration of habitat loss and increasing pace of species extinctions due largely to the activities of populations at the global economic peripheries. (The problem of overconsumption in the global North is acknowledged but deemed too resistant to change.) But how is time...