ANDRANOTSIMATY, Madagascar — On an August afternoon, a conspiracy of golden-crowned sifakas made their way across Andranotsimaty, a settlement inside Loky Manambato Protected Area in Madagascar.

There are other kinds of gold here too. It was here that Roméo Richard Mananjara hit pay dirt in 2017. Gold-rich soil he collected near his family’s well yielded 10 grams, or a third of an ounce, of the precious metal. Soon, miners from near and far poured into the area.

Two years later, this corner of Madagascar became the focus of a proposed gold-extraction project led by a player from far beyond Malagasy shores: the French luxury giant Chanel.

The plan was to buy gold from artisanal miners operating inside Loky Manambato. A 2019 report commissioned by Chanel and shared with Mongabay by French accountability platform Climate Whistleblowers called it an “innovative” approach to sourcing gold from “environmentally-delicate settings.”

In this case, the setting was a 500-square-kilometer (193-square-mile) chunk of Loky Manambato — a fifth of the protected area.

Chanel shared a statement with Mongabay suggesting Loky Manambato was one of the “research projects” undertaken by the company “to study the possibility of setting up new supply chains, in line with the ethical, social, and environmental principles it defends.” It did not respond to specific requests for comment about the project.

In 2020, the Malagasy government banned gold exports. Chanel says it never actually sourced any gold from Loky Manambato, but conservationists argue that a multinational’s attempt to make a protected area a starting point for its global supply chain raised serious questions about what qualifies as ‘responsible’ sourcing.

Loky Manambato is home to 10 species of lemurs (including golden-crowned sifakas, Propithecus tattersalli), primates found only in Madagascar that are teetering perilously close to extinction.

Most humans will likely never set eyes on a lemur, yet they were made famous by the Hollywood movie Madagascar.

Chanel is also a household name in glitzier parts of the globe, but has little brand recognition in Andranotsimaty. “My ears have never heard such a word,” Mananjara told Mongabay. “What is it about?”

Striking a deal

Chanel is all about opulence: the multibillion-dollar conglomerate sells everything from delicate perfumes to bejeweled watches that can retail for thousands of dollars. It’s also a company that says it’s concerned about the actual cost of its high-end offerings and about catering to a more environmentally conscious customer.

In 2019, the iconic brand partnered with a Malagasy conservation NGO, Fanamby, to launch the “Achieving Artisanal Mining and Protected Area Coexistence, and Responsible Gold Sourcing” project in Madagascar, a former French colony.

It was to be a three-year effort to formalize small-scale gold mining occurring inside Loky Manambato Protected Area. Fanamby, which manages the protected area, helped create 13 miners’ associations. The target was to bring 1,000 small-scale miners into the fold, thereby bringing their activities under control. The NGO also facilitated the issuance of identification cards for resident miners.

“We carried out activities with Chanel,” said Nicolas Salo, Fanamby’s landscape manager for Loky Manambato. “As Chanel valued formalized structures, the associations were set up. [The company], for its part, followed up the implementation of activities.”

Chanel also agreed to buy the gold. The sale was to be facilitated by Fanamby, which proposed building a gold collection center in Daraina, a town a few kilometers south of Andranotsimaty, the main gateway into Loky Manambato. It’s connected via National Highway 5a to the coastal city of Vohemar on the island’s eastern coast.

In a draft contract with Fanamby seen by Mongabay, Chanel agreed to finance the entire project at a cost of 400,000 euros (about $448,000).

In internal documents, the company presented the initiative as a win-win, not just for the miners, but also for the environment. “Chanel proposes to spearhead the present project because it senses an urgency behind the fact that a laissez-faire approach to artisanal mining is likely to lead to grave and irreversible social and environmental damage,” Jean Baranger, then an associate director in Chanel’s responsible sourcing team, wrote in a foreword to the 2019 report. According to his LinkedIn profile, Baranger is no longer with the company.

At the end of 2019, the associations included around 300 members. The effort was expected to impact the lives of around 36,000 people who live in and around the protected site.

Not included in the target population were the wild residents of Loky Manambato, the ones Fanamby was charged with safeguarding.

The ‘protected’ area

Loky Manambato’s protected status is richly deserved. Golden-crowned sifakas aren’t the only dazzling creatures that live here. The golden-crowned sifaka is critically endangered. So are about a third of the 107 known lemur species found in Madagascar.

Most lemurs occupy niche habitats. Threats to their embattled homes are often threats to lemur species as a whole.

The Loky Manambato reserve in the northeast of the island is spread across 235,000 hectares (581,000 acres) of land and 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of the adjoining swath of the Indian Ocean. The song of at least 127 birds enlivens these hilly woodlands. This wealth of life is due to the reserve’s location in the transition zone where Madagascar’s eastern rainforests give way to the dry deciduous forests of the north.

Several hilltops form the protected area’s disjointed core, serving as havens for wildlife. Valleys and lower-elevation tracts make up the buffer zone.

Loky Manambato’s natural bounty is exceptional, but not out of place in Madagascar, the planet’s oldest island and also one of the largest. Millions of years of evolution has given rise to a dizzying array of life forms here, from the minuscule (think mouse lemurs and lilliputian chameleons) to the grand (see giant chameleons and towering baobabs) and everything in between.

When, in 2003, then-president Marc Ravalomanana announced that Madagascar was going to triple the area under protection, conservationists and scientists welcomed the news. It was a rare win for a country that struggles to meet the needs of its people and preserve its biological riches.

With so much of its citizenry residing in rural areas, living off the land, and in the orbit of forests, the government decided to designate most of the new protected areas as category V or VI, in line with the norms of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN, an international scientific body, classifies areas set aside for conservation into six categories, with category I areas enjoying the strictest protections.

Loky Manambato is a category V “protected harmonious landscape.” Such reserves seek to accommodate the needs of communities who were already present before the protected areas came into being. It’s also a recognition of the growing movement away from “fortress” models of conservation that exclude resident communities from the conservation project.

This was a crucial detail explaining why Chanel chose Loky Manambato to test this approach.

A slippery slope

In project documents, Chanel and Fanamby emphasize the ideal of coexistence. “IUCN category V protected areas do exist and provide a pathway to coexistence with artisanal mining, as in the case of the project’s target area,” Baranger wrote in the 2019 foreword.

Even when foreign firms aren’t involved, conservation in Madagascar is a complicated endeavor. Despite having substantial reserves of valuable minerals (including gold, cobalt and ilmenite) and gemstones (everything from sapphires and rubies to emeralds), Madagascar is also a country that suffers deep deprivation. In 2023, around 80% of the population was living in poverty, according to the World Bank.

Environmental campaigners are sometimes criticized for pushing the conservation agenda in places desperately in need of material support.

Funding woes also beset local environmental NGOs and government agencies. The agency responsible for protected area management, Madagascar National Parks, depends heavily on foreign funding. That’s also one reason why the management of many protected sites is in the hands of NGOs, both homegrown and international.

Fanamby was set up in 1997 by Serge Rajaobelina as a nonprofit focused on managing some of the country’s emerging protected areas. Its distinctive approach involved promoting the interests of local communities through business partnerships and private sector tie-ups. In 2010, it created Sahanala, specifically intending to encourage economic activities centered on the five protected areas Fanamby managed.

Sahanala also operates in Loky Manambato and was expected to work alongside Fanamby to implement the Chanel project.

Other areas under Fanamby’s stewardship include the unique dry forests of Menabe-Antimena in western Madagascar. This landscape faces intense pressure from slash-and-burn agriculture and the cultivation of commodity crops like corn and peanuts within protected area boundaries.

Madagascar has also struggled to curb artisanal mining in many of its protected areas, with more than 10% of its population directly or indirectly involved in this activity. In places like Daraina, almost everybody is part of the mining sector.

For a long time, Fanamby’s approach has been to tolerate mining in Loky Manambato’s buffer zone in order to secure the core areas. “The exploitation is carried out inside the forest. This is contrary to conservation, but there is an arrangement,” said Gateny Velotombo Mahamod, a community leader and miner in Andranotsimaty. “People were too poor to survive. The [then-]mayor asked Fanamby to let them continue their work, provided environmental protection is respected.”

For the NGO, trying to regularize mining was also a way of keeping newer migrants out. Its ground personnel recognized the complexity of the task. “The most difficult thing is to prevent the exploitation from becoming a rush,” Salo at Fanamby said.

“When you have an NGO in a relationship with a community working on providing livelihoods, it is towards the goal of benefiting biodiversity,” said Charlie Gardner, a researcher who has written extensively about Madagascar’s protected area network. “Once it becomes about commercial exploitation, there’s the risk the goal becomes maximizing commercial exploitation instead of conservation.”

The IUCN’s guidelines about protected areas don’t explicitly forbid mining in category V areas. Malagasy law also doesn’t ban mining. It allows extractive activities in some designated zones.

The law isn’t clear if this accommodative approach extends to exploitation formally backed by a multimillion-dollar foreign corporation.

“As soon as there’s a corporate partnership, one has to ask what’s in it for the corporation?” Gardner said. “It’s never going to be good. It’s either going to be greenwashing their negative activities or taking your resources. Both of them are real concerns.”

James Hardcastle, who leads IUCN’s work on Protected Areas, supported the need to take a “pragmatic” and “sensible” approach to conservation in Madagascar when considering sustainable sourcing of a resource with community support where there is an effective way to minimize impacts. But he also highlighted the dangers.

“It does ring alarm bells,” Hardcastle said of the Chanel arrangement, describing the potential issues. “If this is impacting the stated conservation objectives of that protected area, then it shouldn’t happen. Whether it’s a category five PA or not, it shouldn’t be happening.”

“Second one is really an equity issue,” he said. “The responsibility should be on the company to make sure there’s a fair deal.”

‘Strictly confidential’

Gold is central to Chanel’s business, particularly its luxury watches and jewelry division. Over the years, in recognition of a clientele that is conscious of its impact on the planet, the company became a member of the Responsible Jewellery Council in 2007 and obtained its first certification in 2011. Its Watches & Fine Jewellery division had RJC certification in 2019.

While it didn’t break any national laws in its partnership with Fanamby, documents reviewed by Mongabay show that Chanel personnel were aware of the perils of operating such a way. The 2019 report made it clear that supporting artisanal and small-scale mining, or ASM, within a protected area was a dubious strategy and a reputational risk. “Uncertainty remains on the capacity to defend ASM co-existence with IUCN category V protected areas, given inherent expected biodiversity losses,” the authors wrote.

But it was a risk the company appeared willing to take. “The question of coexistence must be addressed with concrete interventions rather than avoidance, if the conservation and mining sectors are to thrive responsibly,” was the rationale given for Chanel’s decision to go ahead.

Still, the company didn’t want to publicize its involvement in Loky Manambato. “FANAMBY undertakes to keep CHANEL’s participation in the Project strictly confidential,” the draft contract with the Malagasy NGO reads.

None of the miners Mongabay spoke to in Andranotsimaty identified Chanel as the potential buyer of their gold. “We don’t have the remotest idea. The goal for us is only to sell the gold. We don’t have the idea of where it would go after,” said Jaobotra Samson, a resident of Andranotsimaty.

Some miners referred to a “foreign buyer,” which raised hopes they would get higher prices. “We expected the price of the gold to get better once the project is successful because we deal directly with the foreign client,” said Mahamod from Andranotsimaty. “So, hopefully, we could secure good enough money.”

Chanel and Fanamby also envisaged a 10% increase in the income of members of the newly formed associations.

In addition to not knowing where their gold might be headed, not everybody was thrilled about the plan. “Fanamby planned to build an office. We would be allowed to sell the gold only there,” Samson said. “It sounds like slavery.”

Opportunity lost or bullet dodged?

Ultimately, Fanamby didn’t build the gold collection center in Daraina. No gold was sold under the Loky Manambato project. The Malagasy government suspended gold exports in September 2020 in a bid to counter gold smuggling from the country. (It lifted the suspension in 2022).

“The reality is [the responsible gold sourcing project] has not been successful, and the population couldn’t benefit from it,” Salo at Fanamby said.

The project may have failed, but Gardner and other environmentalists Mongabay spoke to expressed alarm at the thinking behind the program.

Chanel saw Loky Manambato as a potential model for Fanamby to emulate elsewhere: in other parts of Loky Manambato and neighboring Andrafiamena-Andavakoera Protected Area. The latter is also a category V site managed by Fanamby.

The French giant seemed to support exporting this strategy not just to other places but also to other commodities like gemstones and vanilla.

“There’s the potential for using that kind of local access to get cheap gold out of a protected area,” Hardcastle at the IUCN said. “Even though they’re saying it’s only artisanal, the incentive is for the miners to get more because you’ll get more value.”

It could turn out to be a “Trojan horse” he warned. “They’re dressing it up as sustainable livelihoods and artisanal whereas perhaps it’s just another way to do an extractive commercial activity inside the protected area,” he said. “It could be that you let it inside and then suddenly you’ve opened up every single protected area.”

The largest share of Madagascar’s protected areas (a third) are marked out for category V status, according to publicly available data and information from the Malagasy Ministry of Environment.

Globally, almost a quarter of protected areas (52,000) whose statuses are recorded in the ProtectedPlanet database (209,000), fall under category V. This is likely an underestimate. For more than 100,000 sites, the designation isn’t available.

At a time when the global community has set itself the goal of conserving 30% of Earth’s land, waters and seas, Loky Manambato lays bare vulnerabilities in existing protections.

Citation:

Stoudmann, N., Reibelt, L. M., Rakotomalala, A. G., Randriamanjakahasina, O., Garcia, C. A., & Waeber, P. O. (2021). A double‐edged sword: Realities of artisanal and small‐scale mining for rural people in the Alaotra region of Madagascar. Natural Resources Forum, 45(1), 87-102. doi:10.1111/1477-8947.12215

Rivonala Razafison contributed reporting from Andranotsimaty, Madagascar.

Banner image :Estelle Mariam from Daraina, 27, mother of two, pans soils in the dried up riverbank in Andranotsimaty. Image by Rivonala Razafison/Mongabay.

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