During the dry season on the Ihorombe Plateau in southern Madagascar, a cool wind sweeps unceasingly, rustling through the golden stalks of parched grass. In Malagasy, the name “Ihorombe” is derived from a combination of two words: “horo” (a native grazing grass) and “ombe” (zebu cattle). It is no coincidence that this flat, almost treeless savanna, dotted with herds of cattle in constant search of the best horo pastures, is called the “zebu grazing ground.” For centuries, the lives of the people in this remote region, two days’ journey by car from the capital Antananarivo, have revolved around free grazing and subsistence farming.
Zebu herding is the region’s backbone, with these hardy cattle — distinguished by their humped backs and long, curved horns — serving as both an economic mainstay and a deeply symbolic cultural asset. Zebus are more than livestock; they are a form of wealth, a family’s bank and a sacred emblem that accompanies life’s milestones from birth to death.
Each morning at the break of dawn, Ingahy Rizy’s family gathers for a simple breakfast of white rice, cassava and coffee. As the sun begins to warm the dew-soaked grass, the zebu pen is opened — a task usually entrusted to the teenagers, under the watchful eye of Ingahy, the family patriarch.
Rizy’s sons, Razily and Rabega, lead the cattle to graze. After nearly an hour of walking through fields of horo and crossing the province’s lone paved road, the RN7 highway, the zebus settle in their usual grazing spot. The young men pass the time lounging in the sun, smoking hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes, dozing and chatting about music and local happenings. But lately, their conversations have turned increasingly somber, dominated by a single topic: Tozzi Green, a multinational corporation based in Northern Italy that now lays claim to the land.
“This piece of land, where we’ve always brought our animals to graze, now belongs to Tozzi Green,” explains Rabega. “There have been so many meetings and negotiation attempts, but they keep insisting this land is now theirs.”
At the heart of the conflict in Madagascar’s Ihorombe region lies a tangled question of landownership that is rooted in the enduring scars of French colonial rule. Tozzi Green, which is leasing land from the state, claims its operations are lawful. Yet for local communities, the concept of ownership is far more complex. Colonial-era policies barred most Malagasy citizens from obtaining formal land titles, leaving a legacy of disputes that continues to fuel tensions today. Adding to the confusion is the evolving use of the land by Tozzi Green, which initially used it to cultivate a biofuel energy crop before pivoting to maize. Now it is pivoting again to plant trees on what had been a prairie, as part of a carbon offset project. Beneath the surface, the dispute is a microcosm of the contradictions of the global carbon offset market and its often overlooked human cost.
Razily and Rabega recount with growing unease how several herders have been fined or chased away — sometimes with dogs — when their zebus wandered onto land where the company had begun planting maize. They now worry that the expansion of the forestation project will result in their complete exclusion from the land. “If Tozzi Green continues with their projects,” Rabega says, “we won’t be allowed to come here anymore. I don’t know what we’ll do then.”
This seemingly distant conflict landed squarely in Italy on Oct. 13, 2023, when the anti-poverty nongovernmental organization ActionAid, along with two Malagasy associations, BIMTT and Collectif Tany, which is dedicated to the defense of land rights, filed a complaint with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development National Contact Point in Italy against Tozzi Green and its Malagasy subsidiary, Jatropha Technology Farm Madagascar (JTF).
The complaint accuses Tozzi Green of land dispossession, inadequate community consultation and environmental harm, potentially breaching OECD guidelines. The complainants demand the company withdraw from the Ihorombe region, returning the land to local communities — an option rejected by Tozzi Green, along with all the stated accusations.
Tozzi Green was founded in the aftermath of World War II as a family business producing and selling electric control panels for small factories, in a town near Ravenna. Eighty years later, Tozzi Green has transitioned to the renewable energy sector, investing in hydroelectric dams and rural electrification projects, and now operates in Italy, Peru and Madagascar, with an annual revenue of nearly $103 million in 2023. The company is relatively well known in Madagascar; billboards advertising a hydroelectric dam they constructed in the northern part of the capital are visible near Antananarivo airport. The company’s presence in the remote province of Ihorombe was formalized through two contracts signed with the state in 2012 and 2018. These agreements lease land in several communes in the province for $65,600 annually over a period of 30 years. They are at the root of the conflict, which is centered on the deeply contentious issue of landownership. While the Malagasy government and Tozzi Green assert that the land belongs to the state, the associations claim it as the rightful property of local communities.
“Land grabbing is a practice where, for the profit of foreign multinationals, local authorities strip land from its legitimate occupants — often under the guise of formal legality,” explains Luca Saltalamacchia, a lawyer specializing in civil cases related to human and environmental rights who is representing the associations. According to ActionAid, this marks Italy’s first official case of land grabbing — the illicit appropriation of land. The complaint also implicates the Belgian and Finnish governments, whose public development banks have financed Tozzi Green’s agribusiness projects. More than a year after the complaint was filed, though, none of the parties involved has received communication from the National Contact Point, which is tasked with facilitating dialogue, encouraging them to reach a consensual resolution and preventing the matter from escalating into a judicial case.
Indeed, resolving this dispute is no simple task, given Madagascar’s complex and fraught postindependence legacy. Until 1942, when French colonial rule came to an end, Malagasy citizens were effectively barred from acquiring land. As a result, landownership was passed down orally through generations. A 2005 land reform recognized the rights of those occupying land without formal deeds. Yet, in practice, confusion reigns. Many provinces, including Ihorombe, lack cadastral offices, whose role is to meticulously document and define landownership boundaries, although they are legally required. The associations allege that Tozzi Green exploited these legal ambiguities and benefited from the complicity of the Malagasy state and local politicians.
Land grabbing in Madagascar is a very sensitive issue, particularly after a 2008 case made global headlines and caused a national crisis. Then-President Marc Ravalomanana’s administration had struck a secret deal with South Korean multinational Daewoo. The agreement granted Daewoo rights to some 5,000 square miles for 99 years to cultivate maize for export, triggering a scandal that led to the deal’s cancellation and widespread protests. These protests culminated in the 2009 coup that brought down Ravalomanana and saw the young French-Malagasy businessperson Andry Rajoelina rise to power. Despite promises to curb foreign exploitation, Rajoelina has made little progress.
Collectif Tany, a Malagasy activist group dedicated to the defense of land rights, emerged from the outrage surrounding the Daewoo scandal. “Just a few years after the Daewoo case, local activists from Ihorombe reached out to us, and this is how we learned about Tozzi Green,” recounts Mamy Ratrimoarivony Rakotondrainibe, co-founder of Collectif Tany. She was not surprised, she says, since the resistance to exploitation has always been stronger in Ihorombe than elsewhere. “The issue is the blatant disregard for local communities’ rights and the illicit methods — pressures and coercion — that Tozzi Green and local authorities use to extract their consent,” she adds.
The Ihorombe Plateau is a peripheral region historically marginalized by central institutions. The sparsely populated region suffers from an extreme poverty rate of 78%, according to UNICEF, which is seven points above the national average. The three main communes — Andiolava, Satrokala and Ambatolahy — are home to approximately 35,000 people with little to no access to healthcare or basic public services. Most settlements lack running water and electricity. The scale of economic deprivation is stark: The budget of Ambatolahy, the largest municipality, is just $8,300 annually.
Tozzi Green’s venture in Ihorombe began over a decade ago with the cultivation of Jatropha curcas, a shrub native to Central America. In the early 2000s, jatropha experienced a meteoric rise to prominence, touted as the sustainable energy source of the future. It was hailed as an ideal biofuel crop: high-yielding, drought-resistant and capable of thriving in extreme conditions.
The success of jatropha was as short-lived as it was sensational. The plant’s overhyped yield projections never materialized, and jatropha cultivation was gradually abandoned worldwide. In Ihorombe, that left thousands of acres overrun with scattered shrubs. A few wild plants can still be found in Satrokala — along with lingering memories among locals, who remain puzzled by the excitement surrounding a plant they had never heard of and that had no value for food, tools or construction.
By 2014, Tozzi Green had shifted its focus, converting its fields to maize, legumes and geraniums for the production of essential oils. Yet even these efforts have faced challenges. Recently, maize cultivation has been almost entirely abandoned after two consecutive years of poor harvests due to adverse climatic conditions.
In response, Tozzi Green has embarked on a new strategy: planting trees to generate carbon credits for sale on global financial markets.
Carbon credits (or carbon offsets, as they are sometimes known), are a kind of transactional remediation for carbon dioxide-heavy activities that humans undertake — everything from flying on an airplane to smelting steel. Companies or individuals who want to offset the impact of their CO2-generating activity will often pay another company, like Tozzi Green, to do something that will, in theory, absorb as much CO2 as they’ve put into the atmosphere. In most cases, this involves planting trees — an activity seen as so universally virtuous that it often obscures the controversial and even detrimental impact these industrial-scale initiatives can have. And in no place is that controversy more visible than in Ihorombe.
Leaving behind the provincial capital of Ihosy, the RN7 highway winds upward onto the Ihorombe Plateau, a climb marked by wide switchbacks. A gendarmerie checkpoint, manned by Madagascar’s state police, signals the official entrance to the plateau. About a 30-minute drive later, midway between the checkpoint and Isalo National Park, a modest roadside restaurant marks a turnoff. From there, a rough dirt road snakes its way to Satrokala, a journey of about 45 minutes.
Approaching the outskirts of the town, the landscape changes abruptly. Wild pastures give way to neat rows of trees, delineating parcels of land planted with geraniums and equipped with modern drip irrigation systems. Along a nearby river, a small dam has been built, creating an artificial reservoir. Women wash clothes and dishes at its edge, while the water feeds into the irrigation systems for the fields. Not far away, a wind turbine and a telecommunications tower rise above the scene, supplying electricity and internet connectivity to Tozzi Green’s operational compound. This has been the Italian company’s regional base since 2012.
A short drive further on lies the municipal office, a modest, low building facing a dusty square. Inside, the mayor receives visitors in a sparse room, its lone desk occupied by a computer and printer — rare commodities in the area.
Joel Jean De Diea, 36, was elected mayor of Satrokala in 2020. He cuts a distinguished figure with his careful demeanor and polite mannerisms. “We are proud that a major company like Tozzi Green chose to establish itself here in Satrokala,” he begins, busying himself with a stack of documents on his desk.
De Diea worked as an accounting administrator for Tozzi Green until 2016, but he insists his support for the company isn’t personal. “This is a company that brings development and improvement to our commune. If they were to leave, it would be catastrophic.”
Those who oppose the company, De Diea claims, are driven by ideology. “They are culturally backward, closed-minded people. They reject all forms of development simply out of a mentality stuck in the past,” he says.
The divide over the multinational’s presence reflects broader tensions across the region, where promises of development clash with growing concerns about landownership and community rights. Over the past decade, the zebu herding community of Ambatolahy has established a reputation as a stubborn opponent of Tozzi Green’s presence.
Ambatolahy, a cluster of earthen and tin-roofed homes south of the provincial road, offers stark contrasts to Satrokala. The village lacks electricity and public lighting, save for a single solar-powered street lamp donated by Tozzi Green. At the entrance of the modest municipal office, a local police officer sporting a Tozzi Green cap lazily oversees visitors. A locked wooden box, emblazoned with the company logo, is available for residents to submit complaints, suggestions or job applications.
Dama Jean Dare Ratolonjanahary, a 27-year-old community activist, lives just around the corner with his wife and daughter in a tiny, tin-roofed home. Ratolonjanahary’s journey reflects both the challenges and resilience of his community.
Ratolonjanahary grew up caring for his family’s zebus and excelled academically, eventually studying agronomy in Fianarantsoa. In 2020, a chance encounter at a community meeting with Tozzi Green representatives changed his trajectory. The company had not hired a Malagasy interpreter, and their presentation was in French; Ratolonjanahary was the only person in the meeting who spoke both languages, and the elders there encouraged him to bridge the communication gap.
Motivated to understand the resistance to Tozzi Green’s activities, Ratolonjanahary co-founded the Comite de Defense des Terres to promote solidarity and advocate for community rights. Through research and outreach, he demystifies complex topics like carbon credits for his community.
In videos for the Green Finance Observatory, an independent think tank working on environmental markets and sustainable finance, Ratolonjanahary critiques the carbon credit system, explaining in Malagasy: “Carbon credits are an excuse to continue destroying nature in exchange for money.”
The damages wrought by the climate crisis are all too familiar to the Malagasy people. Madagascar ranks as the world’s fourth most vulnerable nation to climate change and is regularly battered by extreme weather — floods, typhoons and more. Between 2021 and 2022, a devastating drought in the country’s south plunged over a million people into an unprecedented famine.
Ratolonjanahary’s critique transcends local concerns: “Carbon credits don’t restore what’s been destroyed. We’re not against trees but against a system that leaves us with the damages of the climate crisis while profits go to foreign companies.”
A series of investigations has raised doubts about the credibility of such projects. A 2023 investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial revealed that 94% of credits from rainforest protection projects in South America, Africa and Asia — certified by Verra, the largest carbon offset certifier globally — were grossly overestimated. These credits were linked to initiatives that had little to no real impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
As a result of this and similar scandals, the global voluntary carbon credit market shrank by 61% within a year, plummeting from nearly $2 billion in 2022 to $723 million in 2023. Yet industry experts predict the market will recover and grow in the coming years.
A single tree can absorb around 55 pounds of CO2 per year, but achieving meaningful climate impact generally requires a commitment of at least 100 years, according to the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. This long-term timeline is at the heart of the carbon credit model. Yet most forestation projects, including Tozzi Green’s, are designed for only 30 years, casting serious doubts on their sustainability and true efficacy.
A study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment in June 2024 also argued that planting trees in rangelands — vast grasslands or shrublands grazed by livestock and wildlife, as is the case in Ihorombe — is largely ineffective at combating climate change, while harming local communities.
The lingering uncertainty is whether Tozzi Green’s project can deliver tangible benefits for the climate while genuinely serving the interests of the local community, rather than perpetuating a system that primarily profits outsiders at that community’s expense.
The company has already planted around 14 square miles of land, with plans to expand to almost 20 square miles by 2029. Tozzi Green projects that the initiative could generate 2.7 million carbon credits, which, depending on market fluctuations, could be worth between $16.7 million and $73 million. For Tozzi Green to secure certification from Verra and capitalize on the voluntary carbon credit market, the local community must demonstrate acceptance of the project.
But that acceptance is in limbo. The promise of forestation and economic opportunity brought by Tozzi Green to Ihorombe is increasingly overshadowed by disillusionment, conflict and allegations of repression.
Some community leaders — like Meky Eduar, the lonaki, or elder, of Satrokala — initially welcomed Tozzi Green’s projects. Sitting cross-legged in the community’s meeting hall, Eduar recounts how, in 2013, villagers willingly ceded 600 acres of land to the company. They believed the sacrifice would yield jobs, schools and infrastructure.
“I signed the contracts on behalf of the community,” Eduar says, displaying documents and maps. Written in French, a language many locals neither speak nor read, the agreements relied on verbal explanations. “We opened our hearts to their promises. Now, we feel betrayed.”
A similar sentiment prevails in Ivaro West, another village in the region. Residents there ceded community lands for free, expecting reciprocal benefits. “We thought working with the ‘whites’ would mean a better future — perhaps a French school,” laments Fiharia Rayamandreny, another elder. Instead, the village received only a tin roof and six wooden desks for its school. The sole teacher, responsible for 50 students, has gone unpaid for months.
One issue lies in the disconnect between formal agreements and informal promises. A formal agreement outlining how the local population would benefit from the carbon offset project under Tozzi Green’s partnership with Verra has yet to be discussed. When we contacted Tozzi Green, a representative told New Lines that any community initiatives, including the free clinic in Satrokala it has run since 2012, were undertaken voluntarily and without formal obligation. Tozzi Green maintains that its continued presence in the Ihorombe region stems from its belief in the social and ethical value of its work, rather than any particular advantage or convenience the land offers. Meanwhile, residents recall years of vague verbal assurances made by various company delegates. These promises of “development” and better living conditions created expectations among the communities that have yet to be fulfilled.
Collectif Tany argues that dissenters face mounting repression from local authorities. In a May 2024 open letter supported by several Malagasy civil society groups, they expressed concerns about “continuous pressure and persuasion attempts, including through gendarmerie interventions.”
Tozzi Green denied these accusations in a subsequent letter, labeling them “defamatory” and stating that the presence of the gendarmerie at meetings was to ensure a “calm and impartial atmosphere.” However, the legacy of Madagascar’s colonial history complicates this narrative. For many locals, the gendarmerie — a descendant of the colonial police force — evokes fear and distrust.
Maherelio (a pseudonym to protect his identity), a local activist, describes the escalating pressures on those who oppose the project. Speaking from a secret location, he recounts years of verbal intimidation and police surveillance. In 2020, Maherelio was arrested in Ihosy and released 10 days later following protests. By the end of 2023, he was convicted of extortion and abuse of office — a charge he vehemently denies.
“People who’ve changed their minds about the project have done so under pressure or for money,” Maherelio asserts. “Even I was offered money to stay silent, but I swear on my ancestors’ graves, I will always refuse.” Maherelio continues his advocacy cautiously, raising awareness about corruption and the lack of genuine community engagement.
As the sun sets over the Ihorombe plateau Razily and Rabega prepare to follow their zebu herd back home. In the distance, the trees planted by Tozzi Green dot the landscape, reclaiming a plateau where forests vanished 500 years ago. For the people of Ihorombe, the trees stand as symbols of discord as much as of renewal. They may offer the promise of regrowth, but without mutual trust between the tree’s planters and the local community, as well as the latter’s self-determination, the trees risk remaining symbols of unfulfilled potential and division.
Even if feelings about Tozzi Green are shaded with ambivalence and disappointment, many community leaders and residents in Ihormobe still hope for a way to develop the region that lifts those who live there alongside those who would profit from its richness. But they feel such development would need to include the community from the beginning. As one elder put it during a conversation: “If an egg breaks due to external force, life ends. If it breaks from within, life begins.”
Reporting for this article was supported by Journalismfund Europe.
Randrianarisoa Riana Raymonde contributed to this report.
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