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Be kind, go wild

7 mai 2013, 07:08

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Be kind, go wild

There’s a lot of exciting things going on in the world. Sadly, most of them seem to be passing us by. Indeed, while many countries discuss serious issues such as the bankruptcy of the war on the drugs, the future of the internet, the commoditization of life and the planet’s climate predicament, we remain mired in political entropy.

 

More tragically still, the country has recently had to mourn 21 of its children, victims of two disasters that can at least partially be attributed to negligence, even if the authorities wish to pretend otherwise. And that’s without counting our brothers and sisters who are struck down weekly by acts of senseless violence and criminal recklessness. Nowhere is our devil-maycare attitude more evident than in our chemical agriculture: we know it’s making us sick but we can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

 

In a country that’s increasingly bereft of anything resembling governance, it befalls civil society to do the job of the authorities. This is the case when it comes to the education of mentally disabled children, the recycling of rubbish and organic produce, to name but a few. Last Friday, the “Fondation ressources et nature” (Forena) organized a workshop on the certification process for organic agriculture, a sector that Madagascar, a country we often like to think as a hopeless backwater, has been involved in since 1992. The fact of the matter is that for all our economic advances of the past two decades, we lag behind many of our regional neighbours in a raft of vital sectors: the Seychelles is light years ahead of us when it comes to the protection of the environment, Madagascar beats us hands down for food security and Reunion is leading the way for renewable energy. It really doesn’t have to be this way.

 

 

But a paradigm shift is sorely required. For instance, rather than help inflate the property bubble by investing in real estate development, government should envisage setting aside a large portion of land for organic agriculture. This land could be sublet at nominal cost to planters who are keen to embark on the organic adventure. The authorities could also provide the necessary expertise and resources to optimize their chances of succeeding in creating a model of agriculture free of chemicals. This will not only create green jobs but also help regenerate soils that have been sucked dry by decades of monoculture and reliance on yield-boosting synthetic fertilizers. By doing so, government could actually lead by example for once. Rose-Belle Sugar Estate could be a good place to start. Or even Jinfei. Now that’s something the whole population can get behind: we all want healthy, affordable food.

 

 

For as things stand, we have precious little to show for our much vaunted economic miracle: unemployment is growing, and so is the pauperization of society. Yet rather than question the received wisdom that got us here, we allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by a bunch of people we know to be incurably mediocre. It’s about time we also had something to get excited about.