Qualla: Mandena Mine

Mandena Mine: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image), Public domain. The white sand here is worth digging for. It holds ilmenite, the ore that becomes the titanium dioxide whitening paint, paper, and toothpaste around the world, and Rio Tinto's surveyors found an estimated seventy million tons of it beneath the littoral forest five kilometers northeast of Fort Dauphin. Scientific American called the place they were about to mine one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. For the Antanosy families who fish its lakes and farm its margins, it was simply home. The Mandena mine sits at the collision of those two truths, and the collision has not been gentle.

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Image: John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image) | Public domain

Mandena Mine: A Forest Worth More Than It Looked

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Madagascar's southeastern littoral forests are among the rarest habitats on Earth, narrow ribbons of woodland on coastal sand that exist almost nowhere else and shelter species found nowhere else. The ilmenite lies in that sand, which means the ore and the forest occupy exactly t...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mandena Mine: The Promise That Was Withdrawn

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image), Public domain. In 2004, at a global conservation congress in Bangkok, Rio Tinto made a striking pledge: its operations would deliver a net positive impact on biodiversity, and Mandena would be the company's flagship proof. For a time it funded conservation zones and courted ecologists. Then, in...

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Image: John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image) | Public domain

Mandena Mine: What Flowed Downstream

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image), Public domain. The people who felt the consequences most directly were the Antanosy living around the mine's waters. Pollution reached nearby Lake Besaroy in 2014 and 2015, and only afterward did the operators acknowledge there had been no proper tailings dam on site. In 2019 the Andrew Lees Tr...

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Image: John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image) | Public domain

Mandena Mine: Protest, Promises, and Unfinished Accounts

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image), Public domain. The Antanosy have not been silent. In January 2013, community protests were broken up by Madagascar's armed forces firing teargas; Rio Tinto framed the unrest as a demand for more compensation, while local activists said the mine's workforce was overwhelmingly outsiders, a charge...

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Image: John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image) | Public domain