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 the same ground. The mine, run by QIT Madagascar Minerals, is eighty percent owned by the Canadian subsidiary of the global mining giant Rio Tinto, with the remaining fifth held by the Malagasy government. Its first phase aimed at 750,000 tonnes a year, with ambitions to nearly triple that. Discovered in 1986 and brought into production decades later, the operation cleared forest, cut roads, and created paychecks in one of the poorest corners of a poor country. It also deepened a deforestation that was already underway, and put a price on a place whose true value scientists were only beginning to measure.

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 2016, after members of its own biodiversity advisory committee pointed to the gap between the promises and the practice, the company quietly abandoned the net-positive goal. Scientific American summed up the retreat bluntly: the new aim was avoiding making things too much worse, and observers warned the company was poised to extinguish a biodiversity hotspot. The story became a cautionary tale told well beyond Madagascar, a case study in how easily a corporate environmental promise can be made and unmade.

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 Trust, a British charity that has tracked this mine for decades, reported uranium in the downstream river at levels well above World Health Organization drinking-water limits, with lead higher still. Later analyses by campaigners found some sites far worse: uranium tens of times the safe standard, lead dozens of times over. Rio Tinto has disputed how its activity relates to these readings. But for a family drawing water and pulling fish from those rivers, the dispute is not academic. These are the lakes they have always relied on, and the doubt itself, never knowing whether the water is safe, is its own kind of harm.

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 the company rejected. In 2022 the mine shut down for five days when protesters linked a release of mine water to dying fish, and two tailings dams let roughly a million cubic meters of mine water into local waterways. A settlement reached that May saw 8,778 villagers file claims, yet rights advocates raised alarms that some people felt pressured into signing and were bound to silence afterward. The company has also moved toward cleaner operations, contracting solar and wind power to run the mine. The forest, the water, and the trust of the Antanosy, however, are accounts not yet settled, and the people downstream are still waiting to see how they will be.