48 Scientific American, July 2019aimed at restoring some 675 hectares of forest by
the end of the mine’s life in 2065.
A family of eastern lesser bamboo lemurs ( Hap-
alemur griseus ) frolicked by an outbuilding, gnaw-
ing on bamboo shoots, as Faly Randriatafika, who
over sees QMM’s environmental work, walked
through rows of tiny seedlings arranged in plastic
trays. He pointed to an eight-centimeter sapling of
Eligmocarpus cynometroides, a spindly palm with
fist-shaped seeds, represented by about 20 speci-
mens in the wild, all confined to Petriky. “This
plant is very hard to germinate: out of 500 fruits,
you get maybe only 20 seeds,” he said. “Without
QMM, without this project, this species would
have disappeared completely.”
Lisa Gaylord, then the company’s manager of
corporate relations, communities and sustainable
development, made a similar observation about
the fate of the littoral forests around QMM’s mine
more broadly. At QMM’s satellite office in Tolagna-
ro, she pulled out her laptop to show me an animat-
ed slide depicting changes in forest cover around
Sainte Luce over the preceding decade. The patch-
es of green shrank from year to year like sandbars disappearing
below a high tide. The implication was clear: mine or no mine,
charcoal making and farming will soon take over what little for-
est remains. “We could do nothing, and I could tell you, that en-
tire forest corridor will go,” she said. “It will go. That’s where
Madagascar’s going.”
Yet there can be no doubt that the mining is taking a grave
toll—not only on forests and wildlife but on people. A village lies
at the top of a small hill above the mining area in Mandena, along
a rutted dirt road known as the old highway, less than half a kilo-
meter inland from the smooth tarmac road QMM built for its
own private use. The chef fokontany, or local “headman,” Francis
Maka Teodorik, gathered 10 of his neighbors to talk with me in
his home, where we sat on traditional mats made from mahampy,
a type of reed gathered in wetlands up and down the coast.
Woven mahampy has long been the dominant source of income
for women here, and along with timber for construction, fuel and
charcoal making, its supply is shrinking.
QMM has funded a demonstration plot of restored wetlands
and training sessions to encourage local women to harvest
mahampy sustainably by cutting above the roots. But Teodorik
and his neighbors said these efforts obscure the real impact of
QMM’s mine. Helenette Raverosaotra, a mother of four whose
two-room house overlooks QMM’s processing plant, said it now
takes as many as six or seven foraging trips, instead of one, to
collect enough reeds to weave a mat that sells for less than $3,
as the wetlands around Mandena have been mined one by one.
“QMM has already destroyed all the ma hampy we used for
mats,” said Fidéline Jine, who now spends her days fishing for
shrimp in the river to earn a small fraction of what she once
made. “The mines have filled with sand all the places where the
mahampy grew.”
Local farmers, whose land was flooded to create a water
source for the mine, had another grievance. For years they pro-
tested that they had not received fair compensation for the
amount of land they lost. When QMM finally agreed to assess
how much farmland it had taken over, the company’s own anal-
ysis showed the farmers were right—QMM had paid the farmers
for the loss of four hectares but had taken more than six times
that amount. QMM eventually paid the farmers for the balance.One missing ingredient from the mining-con-
servation partnership, everyone seems to agree, is more robust
government oversight. Says Jocelyn Rakotomalala, who runs a
Tolagnaro-based NGO called Saha, which works with QMM on
social and community projects in the area: “Mining companies
could conserve more if only the state were more demanding.”
Rio Tinto has often credited its commitment to NPI as a cru-
cial factor in gaining approval for the project, but as Heritiana
Ravelojaona, the provincial director of mining in the region,
points out, the agreement it signed with the Malagasy govern-
ment does not require anything like NPI. “Take the case of the
offsets,” he says. “Those are voluntary commitments.” And in
Sainte Luce, where villagers have repeatedly protested their
loss of access to the small protected areas created by the project,
he says, “it’s no longer QMM’s business. It’s up to the state, if it
decides to protect the area, to come up with a way to help satis-
fy the demands of the community after restricting access.”
Frank Hawkins, who now runs the Washington, D.C., office of
the International Union for Conservation of Nature, was one of
the first scientists to become involved with QMM. He now feels
that QMM has been a “dismal failure” in terms of social and
environmental outcomes. But Hawkins says he would still get
involved if the process started over again today because the
probable alternative to Rio Tinto is not no mines but mines built
with woefully inadequate environmental protections. The plan-
et is already littered with examples. In Butte, Mont., in 2016
thousands of snow geese were killed when a storm drove them
into a toxic reservoir left behind by an open-pit copper mine that
had ceased operations decades earlier. In the Niger River delta,
oil exploration has brought the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez ED K ASHIRedux Pictures