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Country profile - Madagascar

The island of Madagascar has three major geographical zones, running from north to south. The eastern coastal strip still has areas of tropical forest as well as deforested savannah. Rice and cassava are the dominant food crops while cash crops include coffee, cloves, vanilla, pepper and tropical fruit. Steep escarpments rise up to the central plateaux which form the backbone of the island, and catch the rain from the Indian Ocean. Here rice cultivation dominates the valleys and hillsides. The capital, Antananarivo, is surrounded by thousands of hectares of ricefields; maize and wheat also feature in parts of the centre and south. To the west more escarpments give way to hills and then to alluvial plains. Once covered in dry forest, this area was burned to make way for cattle, and has been intensively farmed, planted to rice in the north, maize in the centre and sorghum in the dry south. Ranching of zebu cattle continues to be important; there are over 10 million cattle on the island, twice as many as all the goats and pigs combined.

Subsistence farming is the norm for over 80% of the population, most families growing both food and cash crops. Political unrest and famine at the time of colonisation led to many Malagasy seeking their survival in the forests. They practised a shifting system of cultivation known as 'tavy', burning off the forest cover in order to plant rice. Population expansion in the 20th century however, has increased the pressure on land to unsustainable levels. Ideally farmland should be allowed to recover for twenty years between cultivation, but such fallow periods became impossible and as a result soil quality and production have both suffered. In addition the island's timber resources were ransacked early in the century and continue to be depleted.

A typical stretch of Madagascar's road network

Only 15% of the country remains under natural forest, and soil and watershed degradation is accelerating the decline in agricultural productivity. While the government has tried to stop the annual fires that burn across the island, in reality the slash-and-burn system is the only way that most people know how to farm and, adding to the cycle of decline, the most common response to falling harvests is for villagers to cut down more forest, their only alternative to starvation. A passenger on a cross-country flight looks down on a bare degraded landscape, dubbed 'the red island', because of the red laterite soils that are being washed, at a rate of 200 tons of topsoil per hectare per year, down the wide red rivers and into the rose-tinted Indian Ocean.

Coffee, cloves and vanilla have been the most important cash crops and all three have suffered in recent years. Coffee exports have been hit by the global increase in supply, and export of cloves has suffered, with Indonesia, the leading buyer, increasing her domestic production. In 1999, Madagascar was the largest producer of vanilla in the world, but three cyclones in 2000 destroyed around a third of the harvest, and many plants were also killed. Vanilla plants take a long time to be nurtured to productivity, and recovery for the industry is expected to take several seasons. The industry has also been hit in recent years by increased competition and the growing use of artificial flavourings. Other cash crops include sugarcane and cotton, which is grown for the local textile industry. Livestock are also an important income earner for many farmers. However, in the last ten years, fish and shellfish have overtaken the former commodities as Madagascar's leading export, and the country also receives valuable foreign exchange from fleets fishing around the coast.

Last year's storms also destroyed around 20% of the national rice crop. This raised the price for farmers already struggling with cash crop losses, and led to food shortages. Once self-sufficient in rice, the country has been a net importer since 1980. The decline in productivity stemmed partly from the spread of coffee, favoured in the pursuit of higher profits. Malnutrition is now fairly common, particularly in the arid south, where hundreds of thousands have been left dependent on emergency food aid following the recent damage to harvests.

Eco-tourism is frequently promoted as one way the rural population might survive without further cutting and burning of Madagascar's depleted forest resources. The island is home to amazing bio-diversity, and many of its plants and animals are found nowhere else in the world. Obviously if rural people could earn a living while at the same time preserving what is left of the natural forests, this would be a major environmental and economic win-win solution. Another industry which is already creating jobs and foreign exchange is clothing. Some manufacturers have moved their operations from Mauritius, to access Madagascar's cheaper labour.

Indeed economically the country seems better placed than many in the area. With over half its GDP generated by the service sector, tourism could act as a potent driving force for economic development. Its wide natural resource base includes various minerals, some of which are already being mined by foreign companies. One major obstacle to such development however, is the weakness of the transport and communications infrastructure. The government has invested heavily in road building programmes, but these, in combination with economic reforms, have created a massive debt burden. It remains to be seen whether the economic benefits that accrue from this investment will outweigh the cost of the debt created, and allow the red island to fulfil its huge natural potential.

Date published: September 2001

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