Madagascar: the trail, the wood and the sapphires | France 5 | Les Routes de l'Impossible

In Madagascar everybody is greedy for “rosewood”. For the country’s illegal loggers the last few remaining trees are their major source of revenue. These coveted trees are among the last on earth. In Masoala, a villager leads a team of five loggers, the “festy festy”, “the crafty cutters”. For five Euros a day, they have to endure torrential rains, mud, mosquitoes and withering heat. They have to bring a 500 kilo log down from the mountain; it takes them three days. An exhausting journey. To bring the “rosewood” home, these men risk their lives in the rapids, the most dangerous part of the journey. Before they can use canoes, the conveyors must shoot the rapids on rafts. The logs are then sent to China. In Madagascar poverty drives thousands of peasants to the south of the island. “Ilakaka”, the biggest sapphire deposit in the world. For some ten years this Madagascan “El Dorado” has been attracting students, the unemployed, taxi drivers… a whole population of the dispossessed, who come to seek their fortune. Stretching out of sight, the ochre earth has been dug by hand into a multitude of man-size holes one metre wide. Ilakaka… everyone can take their chance. You just need a shovel, a pick and lots of luck. To find the precious stones a miner goes blind down into the hole, he digs, he fills a bucket, which another man hauls up to the surface on the end of a rope. All they need to do then is to sift the earth in the hope of finding the precious stone. It’s simple, but dangerous. Problems arise when the hole gets to around ten metres deep and the miners decide to dig horizontal galleries, without any pit props. The area has been transformed into a Swiss cheese where tunnels frequently collapse and where miners regularly fail to return to the surface.