Anne Driscoll, a student in our teen travel blogging class, is currently in Madagascar doing research. For a class assignment, she recently wrote about land conservation in Madagascar – it’s fascinating. Take a look…

The night is cool, the sun has just set, and the trees are swaying slightly in the wind. Every few minutes a truck drives by with a delivery: usually dropping off a load of tourists or a few dozen crates of beer. A few friends and I are sitting in the local bar eating fries, a rare treat for us, and drinking cokes. It’s just a normal night, until a fire starts on the other side of the hill. The smoke envelops the entire valley, and the fire lights up the remaining forest in an orange glow. The open air restaurant smells like smoke, and visibility is remarkably low. Although I look around, confused and a bit worried, nobody else reacts. This is a normal night, and the fires are a normal practice. These fires aren’t small kitchen fires gone wrong – this is the way the agriculture here works.

The Malagasy word for this practice is tavy. Tavy is the description of the typical agriculture here. Most farmers in the area grow banana trees or rice. In the process of growing rice, the fields have to be flooded, and most of the soil’s nutrients are drawn away. A farmer can continue using the same plot for a maximum of three years. Each year the crop yields decrease until the farmer has to clear another patch of forest to create a new set of fields.
But rice isn’t the only crop that causes this deforestation. Any type of subsistence agriculture has this effect. This issue is mostly visible in overpopulated tropical countries, because as population density increases, there is more demand for land. As more land is needed, the fallow period for each field declines, and the soil is eventually left completely spent. Along the eastern side of Madagascar, there are several other things planted in these fields. A common pattern is as follows. The first year, all the trees are cut down for wood. A few years later, small saplings that have arisen from the empty land are cut down for charcoal. The next year, the even smaller trees are burnt for a quick flush of nutrients, to allow grass to grow to feed the cattle and zebu.

Please click through the link above to read the rest of Anne’s excellent article.