Speaker 1:

For 60,000,000 years these forests have evolved in isolation. For all that time, the great island of Madagascar has drifted alone through the Indian ocean. There are 28 species of lemur on Madagascar and none of them can be found anywhere else on earth. In fact most of the mammals and almost all the reptiles on the island are unique. So too are more than 80% of the plants in the Malagasy rainforest. It's one of the world's great storehouses of genetic diversity.

Botanist Pierre Jules Rakotomalaza and his partner have been hired by World Wide Fund for Nature to do a stock take.

Pierre Jules:

[Foreign language 00:01:37].

Speaker 1:

Painstakingly they're selecting, identifying and listing every species of plant in a single hectare of forest.

Pierre Jules:

[Foreign language 00:01:44].

Speaker 1:

It's a slow job but they can't afford to take too long because the forest is disappearing faster than they can identify what it contains.

A few months ago the rambaliala family chopped down a hectare of forest and burned the dried out foliage. In the fertile ashes they planted their rice and now in lake Mai they're harvesting. But Jones Pierre knows that the soil won't stay fertile for long. The destruction of new forest is steady and remoteless.

Jones Pierre:

[Foreign language 00:02:43].

Speaker 1:

Human beings first arrived in Madagascar only 1500 years ago. Steering the outrigger canoes across the Indian ocean from the rice lands of South East Asia.

Since then, they've slashed and burned their way across the island. Three quarters of the original forest is gone, and with it the fragile top soil washed by the rain into the rivers and by the rivers into the ocean.

Most of the rainforest that remains is in the remotest parts of the country. From the airport on the tourist island of Nosy Be off north west coast of Madagascar it's a two hour boat trip to the mainland.

We're going to visit a unique pilot project in the hills. According to it's creator, it offers the only hope of stopping the destruction.

Dr. Nat Quansah:

[Foreign language 00:04:12].

Speaker 1:

Doctor Nat Quansah was born in Ghana in West Africa and trained as a botanist in London. He first fell in love with Madagascar when he came here as a student. He is no fan of the traditional approach to conservation. "Trying to fence the forest off from the people," he says, "Just won't work in the long run."

Dr. Nat Quansah:

People are made for nature, nature is made for people. And until we learn to make that to work in a balanced equation, we're not going to get anywhere.

Speaker 1:

Nat Quansah needed a place for his experiment that was too remote from the modern word and he found it. It's only 70 kilometres from our landing place on the coast to the village Rambuda Sekwana in the hills, but national highway six the main road south to the capital is no superhighway. And this was the end of the rainy season. As darkness fell, so did the rain.

Three hours later we finally extracted the land rover. It wasn't until 4:00 the next morning that we reached the end of the road. Even here in the remote hills the forest has been cleared and burnt but the rice farmers, not once but time and again. But high up on the mountain slopes, great sways of primary forest remain untouched. And just as important for Nat Quansah's project the ties between the people and the forest haven't yet been broken.

Dr. Nat Quansah:

I'm doing this project with this hypothesis; that if the lives of the people and the habitats or the biodiversity around them are interwoven, are intricately interwoven, and those people's lives depend on this biodiversity, then those people also will happily or willingly take up the responsibility to save those resources.

Ndrunale:

[Foreign language 00:07:11].

Dr. Nat Quansah:

[Foreign language 00:07:15].

Speaker 1:

Ndrunale is a traditional healer, he knows the medicinal properties oh hundreds of species of plant and fungus. Knowledge that's been accumulated for a thousand years and more.

Ndrunale:

[Foreign language 00:07:25].

Dr. Nat Quansah:

[Foreign language 00:07:26].

Ndrunale:

[Foreign language 00:07:33].

Dr. Nat Quansah:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Speaker 1:

When Nat Quansah found Ndrunale it looked as through his precious knowledge might never be passed on. The church regarded him as a witch. The doctors dismissed him as a quack. The people were beginning to turn away from his traditional remedies. But for Nat Quansah those remedies were the key to his new approach to conservation.

Dr. Nat Quansah:

The people using plants for medicine is the link between them and nature and it's a strong link because if you are ill you can't do anything, if you're strong and healthy you can do lots of things.

Speaker 1:

In the village of Rambuda Sekwana Nat Quansah set out to strengthen that link still further. With the help of the WorldWide Fun for Nature he set up a most unusual health clinic.

For a 70 year old Joseph Manaparana is pretty fit. But he's been suffering from stomach pains. A few years ago he would have had to travel 80 kilometres a third of it on foot to reach the nearest clinic. Now he can find a doctor just by crossing the river.

Dr. Karl:

[Foreign language 00:09:02].

Joseph:

[Foreign language 00:09:03].

Dr. Karl:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Speaker 1:

There's always a fully qualified GP like Doctor Karl Randriambololona on duty at the clinic.

Dr. Karl:

[Foreign language 00:09:11]?

Speaker 1:

But twice a week he finds himself sharing his examination room with an arbitrate traditional healer.

Joseph:

[Foreign language 00:09:19].

Dr. Karl:

[Foreign language 00:09:20].

Speaker 1:

Together doctor and healer make their diagnosis and agree on treatment.

Ndrunale:

[Foreign language 00:09:27].

Speaker 1:

The rule is that whenever possible the drugs will come from Ndrunale's pharmacy in the forest, stick and leaf, bark and root fruit and flower.

Gradually the healers vast store of knowledge is being passed on to the doctors.

Ndrunale:

[Foreign language 00:09:48].

Dr. Karl:

[Foreign language 00:09:51].

Speaker 1:

Doctor Randriambololona and his colleagues were trained to prescribe the expensive pills and portions of western medicine.

Dr. Karl:

[Foreign language 00:09:59].

Speaker 1:

But first they regarded these traditional remedies with suspicion.

Dr. Karl:

[French 00:10:06].

Speaker 1:

[French 00:10:29]?

Dr. Karl:

[French 00:10:30].

Speaker 1:

But the flow of knowledge isn't all one way, 600 kilometres to the south in the capital Antananarivo the traditional cures of the forest are refined by modern science. This part of the project is led by the first Malagasy woman to qualify as a pharmacologist, Nat Quansah's wife Patricia. She and her students are finding cheap and practical ways to improve the efficiency of Ndrunale's treatments.

The juice of these berries is an effective remedy for cough and fever, but the tree from which they come fruit's only once a year. The distilled oil from the berries can be stored and used all year round.

Patricia:

We try to help the people to convince them that the medicinal plants that they have in the rainforest can cure them. So they now understand better their relationship with forest and they know that their life depends on the forest and they are ready to conserve the forest.

Dr. Nat Quansah:

[Foreign language 00:11:49]

Speaker 1:

It's no quick fix solution but Nat Quansah insists that the clinic is transforming attitudes in Manongarivo.

Speaker 9:

[Foreign language 00:11:59].

Dr. Nat Quansah:

[Foreign language 00:12:09].

Speaker 1:

Respect for old Ndrunale the traditional healer has increased dramatically since the clinic came.

Speaker 10:

[Foreign language 00:12:16].

Speaker 1:

And the forest is already benefiting.

Ndrunale:

[Foreign language 00:12:20].

Speaker 1:

But so far that ban applies only to the small portion of the forest which is Ndrunale's medicine chest. Elsewhere not much has changed as yet. Jones Pierre Rambialala still intends to cut and burn a new plot for his family's rice field in two years time and he is the headman of Rambuda Sekwana village.

Jones Pierre:

[Foreign language 00:13:11].

Speaker 1:

Rice and the way it's grown is still a fundamental problem. Nat Quansah's project is studying how Jones Pierre can feed his family without cutting down hectares of forests to do it. But the health clinic was the community's first priority and so Quansah insists it had to be his too.

Dr. Nat Quansah:

The project agreed to meet the community's priority, make that priority as the project's priority. And in listening to their point of view you build confidence, you build trust. And once that trust is built it becomes easier to talk of and discuss things and find solutions to other problems.

The slash and burn is a problem. Meeting them on their health point has made it easier for us to try and meet them on that agricultural point. If we can save the biodiversity of Madagascar through making the people themselves want to save, there's a lot for the people themselves and for the world.

Speaker 1:

At the current rate all of Madagascar's forest will be gone in 30 years. On its own, a project like Nat Quansah's is too small to make a dent in the destruction, but in one respect at least he's surely right, the humans of Madagascar are threatening the existence of most of its other inhabitants. Only the humans of Madagascar can take on the responsibility for saving them.