Pope Francis denounced the illegal logging and exploitation of Madagascar’s unique natural resources on Saturday as he opened a visit to the Indian Ocean nation with a plea for the government to fight the corruption that is ravaging the island’s environment and keeping its people in “inhumane poverty.”
Francis urged President Andry Rajoelina to provide Madagascar’s people with jobs and alternative sources of income so they aren’t forced to cut down trees to find fertile soil, poach the island’s wildlife and engage in contraband and illegal exportation of its diverse flora, fauna and mineral resources.
“The deterioration of that biodiversity compromises the future of the country and of the earth, our common home,” Francis warned Rajoelina and other government authorities as he began the second leg of his week-long trip to southern Africa.
Madagascar is home to 5 per cent of the world’s plant and animal species, with around 95 per cent of its reptiles and 89 per cent of its plant life existing nowhere else on Earth, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Yet it is also one of the world’s poorest countries, with 75 per cent of its 25.5 million people living on less than USD 2 a day.
Environmental groups and Transparency International have long highlighted the illegal logging of Madagascar’s rosewood forests and other endangered tree species as evidence of the rampant corruption that has made multimillionaires out of a few “rosewood barrons” who have plundered the island’s northeastern forests.