Approximately 10,000 international tourists from countries like France and Italy travel to Madagascar, the world’s fourth-largest island, to explore pristine and vast ecosystems every year. (..) The island is home to a world of endemic child sex trafficking... According to a recent study by Ending Child Prostitution (pdf), an Antananarivo-based nongovernmental organization, there are approximately 1,132 underage sex workers in the capital city who were initiated into the industry by criminal organizations. Another report, this one conducted by the U.S. Embassy (pdf), downgraded Madagascar to the “Tier 2 Watch List” after the country demonstrated what the report called “significant efforts by expanding the child protection network and by working at the regional level to combat child sex trafficking.” Still, while that may represent progress for some anti-sex-trafficking organizations, the same U.S. Embassy report claims that the Malagasy government has also “decreased efforts to prosecute and convict suspected traffickers,” which, according to come child-sex-trafficking advocates, is a large part of the problem. (..) “You cannot have human trafficking if you don’t have complicity with officials and with customs. And the police are always their first clients,” she (Canadian-born activist Florence Boivin-Rouemestan, Justice & Equity) added. (..) In a country where the median monthly income is 200,000 ariary, which is roughly equal to $63, Aina can take home about 20,000 ariary on a good night. The average price for a “passage,” as sex is referred to in Antananarivo, varies between 10,000 and 30,000 ariary, totaling approximately $3 to $10.
Dans NPR
According to World Health Organization estimates, in just over three months, more than 2,000 have become became ill, 171 of whom have died. By comparison, Madagascar saw about 300 cases in 2015 and 2016 each. (..) Treatment centers bulked up their staff. Responders did extensive contact tracing to break the chain of person-to-person transmission. Health workers tracked down about 7,000 people who had interacted with confirmed and suspected plague patients. Ninety-five percent of them have taken preventative antibiotics. Fewer than a dozen of them came down with plague symptoms. In all, about 9,300 people received antibiotic treatment against the plague. At 8 percent, the case fatality rate was unusually low, says Bower, "and there was no spread out of country, either." (..) "I think I'd give it an 'A,' " says Dabney P. Evans, director of the Center for Humanitarian Emergencies at Emory University, of the outbreak response. "I think the alarm bells were rung at the right time. And the response was timely. I do think that this could have been worse,"...
Dans Mongabay
Madagascar’s population is about to boom. The International Futures center at the University of Denver estimates that by 2060 Madagascar will have close to 60 million people, up from 25.5 million today. And yet, only 1.2 million hectares of land are used for rice cultivation, a tiny proportion of the island’s total size. (..) The whole of tropical Africa has less than 35,000 species of plants and at least one third of them live only in Madagascar. Animal species found nowhere else on Earth find refuge in its jungles: the blue-billed helmet vanga (Euryceros prevostii), the camouflaged leaf-tail gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus), and dozens of iconic species of lemurs, to name a few. Those species lived undisturbed until roughly 2,000 years ago. Since mankind arrived then, 90 percent of the original forest cover has gone; 40 percent of it disappeared in the last 60 years alone. While the pace of destruction has arguably slowed, Global Forest Watch found that 2016 was the second-worst year for forest loss in the last 15, with nearly 400,000 hectares cut down.
