Preserving Paradise

Like Madagascar’s rain forests, the country’s National Forest Seed Bank (SNGF) in Antananarivo looks to be losing the battle against human encroachment. Engulfed by the capital’s urban sprawl, the SNGF’s small, scruffy patch of land has row upon row of seedlings, some of them species facing extinction in the wild. They seem too delicate to make it through the furious tropical storms common in the island’s November-to-April rainy season. But SNGF director Guy Rakotondranony insists they will survive — they have to. The seedlings are “our hope for the future,” he says, “our ecological insurance policy.”

Isolated for eons in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar has evolved such a unique range of flora and fauna that 18th century French explorer Philippe de Commerson described the island as “the naturalist’s promised land.” Nature, he wrote, “seems to have retreated there into a private sanctuary where she could work on different models from any she used elsewhere.” Today perhaps as little as 15% of Madagascar’s original vegetation remains, but even its besieged enclaves are a naturalist’s paradise. No Amazon jungle can beat the diversity and uniqueness of species to be found there. Half the island’s birds, upwards of 80% of its plants and 90% of its reptiles can be found nowhere else on earth, and, says palm expert John Dransfield of the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) at Kew in the U.K., “we are discovering new species at an astounding rate.” Many, like the now-famous rosy periwinkle, a source of compounds used to treat leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease, have huge medicinal potential. “It has become a cliché to describe Madagascar as a Noah’s Ark,” says Dransfield, “but it’s true. If we lose Madagascar, we lose an irreplaceable asset.”

Conservationists are fighting hard to preserve what’s left of Madagascar’s biodiversity. Not far from the SNGF, the Horticultural Technology Center (CTHA) is propagating rare orchids, endangered in the wild by plant poachers who steal-to-order for international clients. The same is happening at the Tsimbazaza Botanical and Zoological Park (PBZT), where new greenhouses are being built to grow orchids from Madagascar’s highlands and humid lowland rain forests.

Just a few years ago such efforts would have seemed futile as Madagascar diced with ecological disaster. During the 1980s and ’90s, the island’s natural vegetation was being destroyed so fast that conservationists feared all would be lost early this century. With their natural habitats facing extinction, the island’s remarkable wildlife would be doomed as well. But now there’s growing optimism that the island can halt centuries of environmental despoliation and maybe even reverse some of the damage. “With a lot of luck and effort and help, Madagascar can pull back from the brink,” says Frank Hawkins, technical director of the Madagascar Center for Biodiversity Conservation, a unit of the U.S. environmental NGO Conservation International. He and his wife, Joanna Durbin, who heads the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on the island, are heartened by the 2002 election of reform-minded President Marc Ravalomanana, who has pledged to expand his country’s network of protected conservation areas from 1.7 million hectares to 6 million hectares over the next five years.

The RBG is mapping the island’s flora to help the government identify the best sites for 11 new reserves. It has also included Madagascar as one of the regions covered by its Millennium Seed Bank Project, which aims to conserve seeds from 1,000 Malagasy species over the next 10 years.

The other lifeline for Madagascar’s flora — RBG’s newly launched Threatened Plants of Madagascar Project — has singled out orchids, palms and succulents for special conservation efforts. Rare orchids — Madagascar boasts over 1,000 species — are now being grown at Kew with the aim of repatriating them to the PBZT as soon as the new facilities there are ready. “Unless you safeguard Madagascar’s flora, there’s not much of a future for the fauna,” says Adam Britt, the Threatened Plants Project coordinator who worked for five years with the Madagascar Fauna Group, helping reintroduce lemurs into the Betampona reserve.

Although only four of the 13 lemurs released into the reserve since 1997 are still alive, some of the survivors are now breeding, and that gives Britt hope. In a way it’s symbolic of what’s happening on the island as a whole. There are too many problems for success to come swiftly — if at all. Madagascar is one of the four poorest countries in the world, and poor people tend to value their own survival over that of an environment that has for too long been regarded as an inexhaustible resource. Slash-and-burn farming still continues, as does the hunting of lemurs. “We have yet to overcome some deeply ingrained cultural habits,” explains Vololoniaina Jeannoda, a researcher at the University of Antananarivo’s Botanical Laboratory. “But people, especially the young, are starting to accept that we can’t keep up this reckless exploitation of our heritage.”

Yet even as the country seeks to mend its ways, the law of unintended consequences intervenes. RBG’s Dransfield notes that demand for Malagasy lobsters means more palms are chopped down to make lobster pots. Improved rice yields promised to ease the pressure to expand paddies at the expense of forest, but richer rice farmers use their profits to buy zebu cattle, the local measure of wealth, which contribute to overgrazing. “Madagascar’s problems clearly won’t be solved overnight,” says Kew’s Britt. “But we think things are slowly turning around.” The RBG, he points out, is only one of dozens of organizations now working to ensure Madagascar stays a naturalist’s promised land rather than becoming a paradise lost. “The help is there,” adds Madagascar Center for Biodiversity Conservation’s Hawkins. “Now it must be harnessed.”