July 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 49spill every single year for 50 years. “The sad truth is that the
mining sector finds it very easy to negotiate big deals because
you’re always talking about lots of money,” Hawkins explains.
In Ampasindava, a peninsula in northwestern Madagascar,
high-level Malagasy officials have appeared eager to grant ap -
prov al to a rare-earth mining venture under investigation for
financial misdealings, after it successfully lobbied to shrink an
adjacent protected area. In southwestern Madagascar, an Aus-
tralian firm is in the beginning stages of developing another
large ilmenite mine, one that is likely to exacerbate water short-
ages in an arid ecosystem already straining under the pressures
of drought and deforestation.
Few believe that the Malagasy government has the political
will to extract more meaningful concessions from interested
mine operators on the front end. Hawkins says he would like to
see mining contracts negotiated in the context of broader
regional development plans, so that tourism operators or con-
servation organizations might provide a counterweight and
advocate for a broader vision of development.
For his part, Lowry is dismayed that Rio Tinto’s gambit on net
positive impact does not seem to have spurred a new wave of com-
petition among mining companies on environmental manage-
ment. Indeed, the most hopeful signs of boosting industry’s envi-
ronmental record in Africa have come the old-fashioned way,
through government action. Chad, Sudan, Niger and Gabon, for
instance, have all recently taken punitive action against SINOPEC
and China National Petroleum Corporation, two state-owned Chi-
nese oil giants, for pollution and exploitative management prac-
tices. Zambia got tough with coal-mining opera-
tions largely in response to local protests over labor
conditions and pollution. Shortly after my visit in
2017, Malagasy officials made a fact-finding trip to a
remote part of Rio Tinto’s concession to investigate
community protests against the company—far
more of a government reaction than the biodiversity
committee got with its resignation letter.
Whether that reaction leads to any meaningful
enforcement is a different question. Rio Tinto has
acknowledged that mining in Mandena had en-
croached on a “buffer zone” around a lake that pro-
vides both mahampy and drinking water for com-
munities nearby, increasing the risk that radioac-
tive tailings left over from ilmenite extraction
could seep into the water supply. The admission
came only after two years of prodding by a British
charity that works in the area, the Andrew Lees
Trust, which had to commission a study by an inde-
pendent geophysicist to prove the point. But it
turns out that Madagascar’s environmental regula-
tor—the National Office for the Environment,
funded with fees from mining permits such as
QMM’s—had known about the breach for at least a year. The of-
fice decided not to take any regulatory action.
The most reliable commitments from large mining projects
seem to be those that come with money at tached: In Mongolia,
where the International Finance Corporation (IFC) owns a slice
of the Rio Tinto project, net positive impact is still on the table—
largely because it is attached to the IFC’s own performance stan-
dard on environmental stewardship. Elsewhere in Madagascar,
some of the most successful environmental partnerships between
the private sector and local communities are in the seafood
industry, where there is a clearer link between end consumers in
Europe and the ecological stakes of their purchasing decisions.
Still, Lowry does not regret his decision to work with Rio
Tinto, even after seeing NPI collapse as a company-wide model.
“I think where QMM is today is a whole lot better than where it
would have been, in terms of environmental and social respon-
sibility, if there had never been a committee,” he says. In 2018
Lowry chose to join QMM’s newly minted biodiversity and nat-
ural resources management committee to try and preserve
some continuity with the previous group’s work. In a way, he
was persuaded by Rio Tinto’s retreat. With QMM, at least, deci-
sions about conservation won’t be made in London. From its
offices in Tolagnaro, the forests are not an abstraction.MORE TO EXPLORE
Conservation Status of Vascular Plant Species from the QMM/Rio Tinto Mining Area
at Mandena, Tolagnaro (Fort Dauphin) Region, Southeast Madagascar. Porter P.
Lowry II et al. in Madagascar Conservation & Development, Vol. 3, No. 1, pages 55–63;
December 2008.
Madagascar: Rio Tinto Mine Breaches Sensitive Wetland. Edward Carver in
Mongabay. Published online April 9, 2019. https://news.mongabay.com/2019/04/
madagascar-rio-tinto-mine-breaches-sensitive-wetland
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Saving Eden. Rachel Nuwer; May 2016.
scientificamerican.com/magazine/saWOMEN HARVEST MAHAMPY, a type of reed that grows in
wetlands along the coast. The mahampy is coated with clay and
dried before it is woven. For villagers near Mandena, one of
Rio Tinto’s mine sites, woven mahampy has long been a key
source of income. But the supply of the reed has dwindled as
wetlands there fill with sand from mining.