Within the framework of a European project, Friends of the Earth France and its partners have chosen to support reportage and journalism projects. This report is one of a series of five case studies focusing on issues surrounding the carbon markets and their impact on agriculture and forests. This report examines the Holistic Conservation Programme for Forests in Madagascar, led by WWF Madagascar and GoodPlanet and funded by Air France. It was written by Sophie Chappelle, a journalist for the news website Basta ! (www.bastamag.net) and is the result of a field mission organised in May 2013.

Part 1 and the Recommendations of this report were written by Sylvain Angerand, for Friends of the Earth France. Part 5 was co-written.

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Alcoa. ArcelorMittal. Barrick Gold. BG Group. BHP Billiton. BP Foundation. Bunge. Cargill. Chevron. Coca-Cola. De Beers Group. Giti Tire. Goldman Sachs. Kimberly-Clark. Kraft Foods. McDonald’s. Medco Group. Monsanto. MPX Colombia. Newmont Mining Corporation. Northrop Grumman Corporation. Rio Tinto. Shell. Toyota Motor Corporation. United Airlines. Walmart. Wilmar International.

If you think this looks like a list of some of biggest companies in the world, responsible for appalling levels of pollution, you’d be right. But this list is not taken from a radical green campaign hitlist, but from Conservation International’s Corporate Partners. Conservation International is proud to work with these companies, helping them (for a fee, of course) to greenwash their images:

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“Many scholars conducting research in Madagascar have demonstrated that the livelihoods of Malagasy people have been negatively impacted by various natural resource conservation and extraction interventions which have burgeoned over the last two decades.” This comes from a report of a June 2010 conference that took place in the UK.

The two-day conference, titled “Voices from Madagascar’s Forests Improving Representation and Rights of Malagasy Forest Peoples,” took place at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia in the UK. Despite the evidence of the impact of conservation and mining on local communities in Madagascar, the report of the conference (available here – pdf file, 1.2 MB) notes that,

Almost no mechanism exists enabling the voices of communities living in or near protected or mined areas to be properly heard, and at the same time conservation organisations and mining companies provide little publicly available information which is evidence based about the claims of the social impacts of their activities.

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