Think of Madagascar, it’s an Eden of rare life found no where else on Earth. Imagine yourself deep in the southern corner of the island with its magnificent coral reefs, geckos, chameleons, birds, lemurs and trees in the spiny baobab forest. Your family also lives here and is one of the 17 million Malagasy people living on less then 1$ per day. You live in a small isolated village, fishing or growing rice, corn, manioc, papaya and melons in the hot and very dry climate. Life is a struggle for survival and what you grow is just barely enough to feed yourself. Your only source of income is derived from selling fish, growing corn, or harvesting the trees you cut from the forest to produce charcoal. Your local natural resources are the only thing that keeps you and your family alive.
Given that this is the way your grandfathers lived and the isolation you experience, it is impossible for you or anyone in your community to imagine how life could be different; yet you still find a way to remain happy and optimistic, open to the world around you and any new opportunities that arise.
The real underlying problems are out of your hands, you are clueless and essentially helpless against global external pressures that dictate local markets which directly affect your community. You understand from the elders in the village that the fields are not as productive as they once were, rains come less often, it is hotter for longer portions of the year and the corals are dying. What you are ignorant of is the discrepancy in income you receive for the octopuses that you and your brothers harvested out of the sea, versus what people in Beijing are paying for them. Or that your greatest asset, the forest, is being cleared faster then anywhere else on Madagascar, just to be turned into corn that is fed to pigs on the touristy island of Mauritius. You have no idea what the price of charcoal is in the capital yet you still wake up every morning before dawn to work the entire day out in forest for one bowl of rice per day.
You are definitely unaware and could not possibly imagine the magnitude of the consequences of what it means that your forest is earmarked by multinational mining corporations. You have never seen a picture of an entire forest cleared, and it is unfathomable that a single machine could drain all the precious ground water out from under your feet. Yes this could happen and already is in other parts of Madagascar, just so the sands under the forest that your ancestors have lived off of for thousands of years, can be mined out and turned into LCD screens and whitening agents for linens and plastics, destined for China and North America. The saddest part is that you can’t stop it, because you have no education about these things and you don’t have other opportunities to do anything else so you don’t think about it.
As a result, you go about life as it is and keep harvesting your resources, and so do your neighbors and their growing families. Your entire community has a tremendous knowledge about the forest and its medicinal values. Your happiness and pride is derived from these natural connections to the land and sea. But you keep hearing from the elders, that the rising temperature and shorter rainy season is exacerbating the struggle for survival. No one really foresees that the local resources are very limited when continuously depleted and that they need thoughtful attention to be conserved and restored for future generations. These pressures have never existed before and no one has any new information about how to reverse unsustainable cycles, hence the need for intervention.
Inspired by the examples set by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ - New Latitude is implementing a similar approach to fundamentally empower the next generation. New Latitude will use existing resources and grow surplus vegetables, intercropped with thousands of locally propagated trees. To ensure the long-term viability of the project New Latitude will working with locals to create sustainable fair-trade livelihoods aimed at restoring and protecting natural environment for future generations.
New Latitude will mobilize participatory community initiatives by building local capacity and leadership to equip communities with new skills. This will be accomplished by introducing a program which offers tangible benefits through improving existing livelihoods schemes, self-motivated life-long learning opportunities, resulting in beneficial conservation alternatives for future sustainability of natural resources and biodiversity.
What been done
A feasibility analysis in the pilot phase of New Latitudes operations in SW Madagascar has determined that improvements to agro-ecological systems are emphatically supported by communities. By generating new economical alternatives and increasing food security from very basic improvements to food production methods (i.e. Composting) greatly reduced local resource over-exploitation. An example training center consisting of an efficient perma-culture garden with improved soil quality, no-till planting and drip irrigation system intercropped into a native and fruit nursery has been developed and will be expanded as an exemplary regional reforestation and livelihood improvement model.
Working together to be innovative
Sustainable opportunities, education and enterprise (offered via project hoavy) are far more appealing to rural communities then only being able to make a living from harvesting charcoal, being a farmer or a fishermen. Exchanging ideas is the next step to expand existing information networks and develop a training center consisting of a primary school and Spiny Forest research facility. We will recruit local leaders, i.e., villagers, University’s and professionals who will replicate this model and provide training and implementation in neighbor communities. Through this model, our project will propagate the exchange of information between communities and the establishment of further projects determined by the local community advisory committees.
Outreach
Frequent workshops will be held and a local radio broadcasting program will facilitate the exchange of experiences and knowledge and facilitate on-going recruitment of new members for community restoration and monitoring projects. Further training will be provided for eventual outlets to sustainable eco-tourism.
We anticipate that 80% of the population will be involved and will participate in the improved agro ecological scheme, e.g., nurseries, permaculture and native tree propagation and 40% will become successful local entrepreneurs by selling excess food in markets, educators, researchers and tour guides, improving their income by 60% in just 2 years. We expect to reach up to 10,000 local people of all ages and raise awareness about how global environmental issues affect SW Madagascar and how local people can develop resilient proactive ways to ensure self-sustainability. This will be successfully accomplished by creating community associations and organizations, that will be financially independed in the long-run through government, micro-finance and international funding sources.
No comments:
Post a Comment