Abstract EN:

Environmental discourses in Madagascar emphasize deforestation and the destructive practices of peasants. This idea became a received wisdom that we are putting on to the test in the context of a contact forest-savanna landscape, in South Betsileo. Here, deforestation has been processing slowly for the past centuries. This is due to the way that the Betsileo civilisation built itself. : peasants, living in villages at the edge of the forest, slowly abandoned a former complex land use system and focalised on wet rice cultivation associated with cattle breeding, During the last century, human settlement and land use have fluctuated between periods of expansion at the expense of the forest, and periods of coming back to the old villages. Forest and trees planted are traditionally used in a symbolic meaning, in order to appropriate the land. For the last thirty years, forest has been playing a new economic rote. Deforestation is processing. Forest's protection became a major stake for NGO.