The Robe of the Ancestors: Forests in the History of Madagascar

T he history of Madagascar's forests-what the Malagasy refer to as the "robe of the ancestors"is an example of forestry problems now widespread in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. But the history is compressed in time: people have occupied the island for less than two thousand years and yet have reduced the robe to tatters. They have devised a wide variety of life-styles, which are adapted to the great diversity of climates. Each of these ways of life gnaws at the remnants of forest. Reforestation policies have emerged, little by little, applied by a small and embattled forest service, under successive governments: the Merina highland kingdom of the nineteenth century, the French military and colonial government since 1896, and the Malagasy Republic, formally independent since 1960 and socialist since a troubled change of regime, 19721975. So far, planting has not kept pace with clearing. A brief history of the experiments and emerging strategies will show how the forest problem is dominated by two features-a fast-growing population and the struggle between central and local authority. Madagascar differs radically from North America by its forest way of life, which is Indonesian or Malay in origin, and by the absence of commercial markets and private appropriation of forestland. Yet the underlying continuity in the forest history of Madagascar illustrates a curiously familiar problem of structuring incentives for sustained forest management.