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Mae’n ddrwg gen i, mae’r cofnod hwn dim ond ar gael mewn English.
MONEY for Madagascar has joined 108 other civic and non-governmental organisations calling on the President of the Malagasy Republic to suspend work on an ambitious, but so far destructive, road-building project in the country’s east.
The Antananarivo-Taomasina highway project – funded by the IMF – has the potential to considerably improve communications between the capital city and East coast of Madagascar, though as we have previously noted, it also risks the destruction of large swathes of Malagasy rainforest, which must not take place.
But in the first few weeks of construction, local communities living along the 80km stretch on which work has begun report a new problem: the destruction of their livelihoods, land and crops without warning or compensation, and potentially without the possibility of recovery.
Those people, who rely on agriculture not just for incomes but for survival, report that bulldozers from the construction firm Samcrete have ‘razed our rice crops and fields (and)… deprived us of our main means of subsistence’ and caused the water in their rice fields to be displaced by torrents of red mud – a situation which may prove to be irreversible.
In our joint appeal to the Malagasy president, we and 108 other organisations call for the president to:
- immediately suspend the current work and immediately halt the destruction of agricultural land until a consultation process and a real consultation with the affected populations and Civil Society Organisations has been held;
- transparently publish all official route documents, drawn up in consultation with the affected populations by municipality, and duly stamped;
- effectively implement a clear compensation and resettlement plan, in line with national and international standards, ensuring fair and equitable compensation for each affected family, whether or not they have formal titles, before any work continues;
- honour commitments to environmental protection and food security, by putting in place alternative solutions to preserve fertile land and the livelihoods of rural communities.
Read the full communique below, or in English here.
