Formerly an independent kingdom, Madagascar became a French colony in 1886, but regained its independence in 1960. During 1992-93, free presidential and National Assembly elections were held, ending 17 years of single-party rule. Madagascar’s forests are a shimmering, seething mass of a trillion stems and dripping leaves and slithering, jumping, quirky beasts out of nature’s bag of tricks.
Cut off from the African mainland for millions of years, Madagascar’s teeming forests are a naturalist’s wet dream; they’ve preserved oddities and developed specializations found nowhere else on earth, and you can get among them in a spectacular collection of accessible national parks. But any nation that turns to North Korea for aid has got to be a basket case. Madagascar’s Marxist generals as well as its chameleons are fresh out of the Age of Dinosaurs. The generals haven’t got it right – part of the population regularly suffers malnutrition owing to bad seasons and archaic economic orthodoxies at home and abroad.
Since human settlement, the forests have been whittled down to a mere 15% of their former extent, scores of species are on the brink of extinction and the topsoil is barreling down into the Indian Ocean like. The countryside alternates between astounding untouched forests and breathtaking human-induced destruction on a scale almost unmatched anywhere. Madagascar’s physical geography is not conducive of the current global trends and needs for economic production. They are severely behind the World as a whole in economic growth and restructuring to fit new world markets.
Most of Madagascar lies in tropical or subtropical environment; the soil structure in these sorts of regions is not able to sustain long-term cultivation. The topsoil is good for agriculture for a few years, but after much longer it becomes burnt out, or depleted, and then it needs to rest for a period of time until it can yield a decent crop again. This is because of the way this soil obtains nutrients and the type of nutrients generally located there. Considering the island’s physical composition, it will be hard for the poor African nation to catch-up to the new world averages.
Physical Geography Madagascar is located 250 miles off the eastern coast of Africa, just south of the equator. This island nation contains no Principal’ lakes, oceans, seas, rivers or islands; however it does have one Principal’ mountain- Maromokotro- that is located on the island’s central plateau. The island is over 1000 miles (1580 km) long and 350 miles (570 km) wide. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world – after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo. It is about the size of Spain and Portugal combined, or slightly less than twice the size of Arizona.
It lies in the Indian Ocean, separated from Mozambique on the African mainland by the 400km (248mi) Mozambique Channel. Unlike its volcanic neighbors – Mauritius, Reunion, Rodrigues and the Comoros – Madagascar was formed by continental drift rather than volcanic eruption, it tore off the African mainland around 165 million years ago. A narrow coastal strip in the east is where most of the rainforest grows; the central plateau in the high altitudes is cool; and there are plains and low-lying plateaus to the west. Ecology
Madagascar is a continent in miniature, with vastly different habitats such as rain forests, river valleys, coastal plains, grasslands, caverns, and deserts. Like many islands Madagascar also is home to a huge number of endemic species. The international conservation community has singled it out as one of the ecologically richest countries on the planet; Madagascar and the nearby Comoros have nearly one-quarter of all the flowering plants in Africa. It also has 90% of the known species of lemurs, and half the world’s chameleons are found there.
Add baobab trees, unique cacti and aloes from the dry areas, and you start to build up a picture of an incredibly rich ecology. When humans arrived, they brought rice and slash-and-burn techniques to clear the way, and today the situation is grim, with barely 15% of the original forest cover remaining. Ecoregions There are three main eco-regions in Madagascar, which create a broad variance in the natural vegetation. These three regions lie in the Humid-Tropical zone, the first of which is the Savanna Altitudinal zone.
This zone, in the middle of the island holds grass and other herbaceous plants. In the next zone, Savanna province, broadleaf deciduous trees, grass and other herbaceous plants can be found here along the West coast. The Eastern coast, the Rainforest Altitudinal zone, has broadleaf evergreen trees. A small portion at the Southern tip falls into the Tropical Sub-Tropical desert province and broadleaf deciduous shrub form can be found in this area. Recently, Madagascar has suffered a severe loss of forest cover.
The forest cover was approximately 58,325 square miles in 1995 and had a change rate of negative 4. 1% from 1990 to 1995, compared to a change rate of negative 1. 8% in Chile (a country similar in size and geography) over the same time period. Apart from its southern tip, Madagascar lies wholly within the tropics. The hauts plateaux, that run nearly the length of the island and form its backbone, are cool enough to grow apples and stone fruit, and even vineyards above 800m (2896ft). Snow is not uncommon in winter at the highest altitudes.
Trade winds prevail from the east and the monsoons come from the northwest. With its tropical mid-latitude, most of the rain hits the east coast and the far north, but in the rain shadow southwest of the highlands it remains almost perpetually dry. From January to March, the east coast, the far north and sometimes the far south are subject to occasionally devastating cyclones. Madagascar has a very diverse physical geography; unfortunately, due to its relatively small size and environmental make-up, it is not supportive of any major world economic activities.
