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

1. Geographies of Borrowed Time

It is therefore to this question of labor that all other things are linked. —Chef du district de Mananara, 1911 1 1 Geographiesof BorrowedTime 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.1 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 dirtcheap 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 2 For est and La bor in Ma dagascar 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.2 Most of the timber is shipped to China, feeding the desire of a growing Chinese middle class for Ming dynasty reproductions (Garety 2009).3 It is also coveted for its sonic properties , for the “thickness and creaminess” it lends to the tone of a Gibson guitar (Hunter 2007).4 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 Map 1. Map of the Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve, Madagascar. Created by Rutgers Cartography Services, 2009. 4 For...