Burn to harvest, burn to sabotage: Between fire and water on a sugar plantation in Madagascar

Abstract

Since 2009, the Chinese state-owned corporation SINLANX has been managing the Anjava Sugar Plantation, previously managed by French, Malagasy, and Mauritian companies, in northern Madagascar. Built upon the infrastructure constructed by the French colonial regime and operating based on a collaboration agreement between SINLANX and the Malagasy state-owned sugar company, Anjava presents a telling story of spatialized acts of survival and racialized conflicts over land and water in the interstitial spaces between capitalist production and subsistence economy. Malagasy villagers’ access to resources is often squeezed by multiple enclosures: a water-delivery system and a land-distribution system that prioritize sugar production and a bureaucratic system that punishes those who transgress the enclosures. Although Anjava villagers take advantage of the rhythm of sugar harvests and the nature of fire to sabotage sugar production or to make water claims for their livelihood, the agrarian and infrastructural arrangements at Anjava have perpetuated conditions of chronic precarity and profound marginalization of a landless population. The struggles at Anjava must be contextualized in the complex and ambiguous spaces between capital and labor, livelihood and resistance, dominance and adaptation, and ethnic collaboration and hostility.