Half of the island's 240 species of bird occur only in Madagascar, as do 85 percent of its plants and more than 800 species of butterfly. There are only seven species of oddly bulbous baobab on this island while there exists only one in Australia and one on the continent of Africa. This island is the only home to the lemur, the primitive ancestor of man which has been edged by the monkey everywhere else. The southern part of the country has a different climate. The above are only a few of the species on the island whose natural habitats are being destroyed because of human poverty.
People cut and burn forest to make space for rice and cattle.
The more they cut, the more the land erodes, the poorer the crops and the more precarious their water supply. Madagascar used to be a self-sufficient nation, but after the government chose a socialist regime in 1975, the country began to decline. Madagascar's economy is mainly based on agriculture. The country's chief exports are rice, vanilla, coffee, peanuts, beans, vegetables, seafood, livestock, sugarcane and cotton. Even though some new technologies have been introduced, many farmers use the traditional way to produce crops because these ways are cheaper.