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  • Petition | Background

    In 1997, most of the Masoala peninsula in Madagascar was declared a strictly protected national park. The Masoala National Park has swallowed up some of the land that local communities are using to grow food or were intending to pass on to their children for them to grow food. This reduction of cultivable land is a big problem for many farming families rendering them even poorer than they were before.

    Moreover, in several areas the park management has in the past years advanced the park’s de facto boundary so that the park now incorporates even more land than at first. In one community where this has happened – in violation of a written contract between the park management and the local population – the latter have written a letter of complaint asking for the park’s agreed boundary to be respected. This was a year ago. The letter has remained unanswered and without effect.

    We have therefore launched a petition giving support to this community’s struggle for the basic human right to have enough land to grow food on.