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Fort Dauphin's end

Fort Dauphin is no longer about beautiful beaches, magical sunsets over a relatively well preserved coastal ecosystem and being the isolated southern city of Madagascar. It's now all about openning up to foreign direct investment aka the Rio Tinto Group,the multinational mining company that recently installed there to extract ilmenite, after a successful 10 year lobbying campaign. Arguably the project intends to boost the economic development of the region, but alarming estimations regarding the potential social and ecological damages persist.

The preparation phase of the project already started - Rio Tinto's style. People's land has already been bought for a few bucks. Their water resources are being utilized already and will soon be either depleted or poluted. On the outskirt of town the new industrial port and private roads are being constructed while the streets in the city center are left to their old condition. But there is worse. With the progressive installation of foreign engineers and miners, the already well developped sex industry is growing fast in Fort Dauphin. When the preparation phase is over, it is planned to bring more workers from South Africa to actually extract the mineral. Since S.A. is one of the most HIV/AIDS infected African country and that there is no preventive health education for prostitutes, the government could be preparing an unprecedented public health disaster - in addition to allowing irreversible potential damages to a fantastic ecosystem.

Ilmenite is mostly used to produce paint... Who will explain to the next generation that they are HIV positive and live in a desolated environment because we needed more paint?

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