Inch has placed the country on a slow and steady growth path. Agriculture, Including fishing and forestry, is a mainstay of the economy, accounting for one- fourth of GAP and employing four-fifths of the population. Export earnings primarily are earned in the small industrial sector, which features textile manufacturing and agriculture processing. Deforestation and erosion, aggravated by the use of firewood as the primary source of fuel are serious concerns. The separatist political crisis of 2002 undermined macroeconomic stability, with the estimated drop in output being subject to a wide margin of error.
Poverty reduction will be the centerpiece of economic policy for the next few years, seines how the 71% of the population are below the poverty line. Of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year, the value comes from 63% services, 25% agriculture, and 12% industry. Services consist of the telephone system, air and rail transportation, tourism, and retail sale. Industry consists of meat processing, soap, breweries, tanneries, sugar, textiles, glassware, cement, automobile assembly, paper, petroleum.
Agricultural produces mostly coffee, vanilla, shellfish, sugar, cotton, mining, and petroleum A unique blend of African and Asian landscapes and cultures is usually one of the first things recognized by first-time travelers to Madagascar. In the zebu cattle- raising regions of the south and west, for example, the savannas resemble those of East Africa. In the central highlands, however, irrigated and terraced rice fields evoke mages of Southeast Asia. These contrasting images lie at the heart of an ongoing debate over the origins of the Malagasy people.
According to one theory, peoples from the Indonesian archipelago migrated along the coast of south Asia, across the Arabian Peninsula into the east coast of Africa and, anally, across the Macaque Channel into present-day Madagascar. This movement occurred over several generations and, because of the gradual interaction between Asian and African populations, led to the arrival and eventual implantation of a distinct Malagasy people and culture. A second theory emphasizes the diversity of the peoples inhabiting Madagascar.
Simply put, proponents argue that the Malagasy resulted from a series of migrations by different peoples over time. According to this theory, migrants from the Indonesian archipelago arrived first and eventually settled in the central highlands, followed by the arrival of African peoples as a result of normal immigration trends and the rise of the slave trade. Recent scholarship has suggested that perhaps the theories are complementary, with greater emphasis being placed on the first.
Scholars traditionally have described Madagascar as being divided into eighteen or twenty ethnic groups, each with its own distinct territory; political developments in the contemporary period are often described in terms of ethnic conflict. Yet ethnicity is potentially misleading in the Malagasy context because it connotes a more or less elf-sufficient and unique cultural, socioeconomic, and historically united group that perceives itself as being different from other groups.
Another potentially valuable method of analyzing Malagasy society is to differentiate between the so-called cities, or peoples living in coastal areas, and those who live in the central highlands. Indeed, scholars have noted in recent years that the salience of ethnic group identity has declined, while the division between the central highlands peoples and the cities continues to be of great importance in understanding social and political competition.
