A recent piece in The Telegraph, “Carbon offsetting may be a gold mine in the West — but in Madagascar, sapphires are the real prize,” highlighted the challenges of illegal mining and deforestation in a protected area in Madagascar where carbon credits are being used to keep forests standing.

As The Telegraph’s story makes clear, protecting the forests of Madagascar’s Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor (CAZ), where Conservation International has worked for years, is a dauntingly difficult task in a country with extreme poverty and a history of governmental instability. Illegal mining in the CAZ and elsewhere in Madagascar is a major social and environmental problem, one that Conservation International has been public about and which we have repeatedly called on the government to address.

Yet as we know from our experience working here, it is small-scale agriculture, not mining, that is by far the largest driver of deforestation in the CAZ.…