Ambatovy. Madagascar’s biggest-ever foreign investment. A sprawling nickel-cobalt operation sold through the usual development brochure language: jobs, sustainability, local growth, biodiversity management and a better future. Lovely words. Then you look underneath and find Cummins iron helping keep the whole dirty miracle breathing.
Cummins’ own case study says Ambatovy runs 30 generator sets equipped with STAMFORD P7 alternators and Cummins KTA50-G3 engines, delivering a combined 37.5 MVA of continuous power. These units operate 24/7 from two plants, feeding power into one of the world’s largest lateritic nickel operations.
That is the commercial link. No guesswork. No fog. Cummins power, Ambatovy mine, nickel and cobalt out, Madagascar left dealing with the bill.
Reliability for the plant does not mean clean hands for the surroundings. And in Customer Corner, Cummins does not get to wave a case study like a trophy while the rest of the story gets buried under tailings, offsets and corporate moisturiser.
Clearing The Forest, Killing The Buzz
Ambatovy sits in one of the planet’s biodiversity hotspots. To build the mine and slurry pipeline, around 2,000 hectares of rainforest were cleared, destroying habitat used by endangered indri lemurs and countless other species found nowhere else on Earth.
The company talks up biodiversity offsetting. Protect forest here, destroy forest there, add a consultant, stir gently, serve as “no net loss”. The Guardian reported that researchers saw Ambatovy’s offsetting as unusually serious and potentially on track, but with heavy caveats: this was not a get-out-of-jail-free card for mines in important biodiversity areas, and the burden of offsetting can fall on vulnerable people who depend on forests for survival.
So the maths may work on a slide. The moral arithmetic still stinks.
Then came the bees. The Ecologist reported that insecticides were sprayed during construction to protect workers from malaria. Farmers and beekeepers near the mine began reporting disappearing bees, failed pollination and dying crops. Jean-Louis Bérard, a retired French architect and farmer, said he had 350 hives and watched them die off within three months. Local farmers within 25 to 30 km suspected Ambatovy’s insecticides were the reason.
The bees reportedly began returning once spraying stopped. Beautiful. A happy ending, if you ignore the years of distrust, broken pollination and the small matter of people watching their fields go quiet because a foreign-backed mega-project had arrived promising development and delivered silent hives.
Red Water, Sour Air, Angry Fishermen
The Ambatovy operation is not just a hole in the ground. It includes an open-pit mine inland, a long slurry pipeline, a processing plant near Toamasina, waste lakes, tailings infrastructure and port expansion. The Ecologist described a reddish lake near Tamatave as a symbol of the project and reported complaints about river water, fisheries, crop impacts, health worries and chemical smells.
In February 2012, a malfunctioning valve reportedly caused a sulphur dioxide leak affecting around 50 people at the facility. The Ecologist said three similar incidents followed. Residents also complained about ammonia smells from infrastructure cutting through residential areas.
People described eye irritation, throat dryness, mouth infections, illness and bad drinking water. Ambatovy denied or disputed parts of the picture and said it monitors water and air quality in line with international standards. It also acknowledged that some villages around the waste lake were given drinking water for a period, saying this was done to “dissipate fears”.
That is some phrase. Not “because people were worried about what they were drinking”. Not “because our giant industrial system had made local trust collapse”. No. Water to dissipate fears. Corporate language doing the limbo under a tailings pipe.
The EIB Complaints Mechanism later received a complaint covering environmental impacts, health and safety, worker safety and resettlement. Its final conclusions said most allegations were compliant or resolved, but it still found that the project was not yet fully compliant on two points: contaminated tailings-facility water and occasional SO₂ leaks exceeding applicable standards, with emergency preparedness around SO₂ not fully settled.
So spare us the clean brochure. The bank’s own complaints machinery found unresolved dirt in the system.
Resettlement, Paddy Fields And The House-Key Shuffle
Displacement came with the territory. The Ecologist reported that households were moved through controversial compensation agreements that divided communities, and that NGO Re:Common found rice paddy farmers had been relocated to less fertile, flood-prone land.
That is classic extractive theatre. Dig it up, move the inconvenient people, hand them a replacement life, then call it development because somebody got a job badge and a training poster.
Madagascar gets cyclones. Madagascar gets fragile land. Madagascar gets communities living close to water, fields and forest. Moving rice farmers onto worse land in a flood-risk setting is not a tidy admin issue. It is the kind of decision that looks harmless in a PDF and catastrophic when the rain starts.
Labour Pains And The Boom-Bust Grind
Construction brought thousands of jobs. Cummins’ own case study says the project employed around 12,000 workers during construction and supported local businesses through training programmes. Ambatovy’s own site still sells itself as a leader in operational efficiency, health and safety, environmental management and social engagement.
Fine. Put that in the front window.
Then put the rest next to it. Local complaints about hiring and firing. Social pressure. Divided communities. A massive foreign-backed project promising transformation while local people argue over who actually gets the benefit and who gets the runoff.
And the money machine itself has hardly been gliding along like a swan. Sumitomo has now moved to exit Ambatovy, transferring its interest to AMRI, a consortium led by Essenwood Partners in partnership with Zungu Investments. Ambatovy says its shareholders are now AMRI and KOMIR. Reuters reported through Kitco that Sumitomo expected to record a loss of around 70 billion yen, about $447 million, while offloading the asset.
So even the people deep inside the nickel dream eventually looked at the thing and reached for the ejector handle.
Offsets, PR And The Reverse Development Special
Ambatovy presents itself as sustainability in motion: community investment, biodiversity management, local growth, jobs, responsible sourcing and economic contribution. It calls itself the largest-ever foreign investment in Madagascar and one of the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Then the public record turns up with insecticide complaints, dead bees, ammonia smells, SO₂ incidents, tailings water issues, resettlement rows, fishing concerns, forest clearance, and a European complaints process that took years to grind through the mess.
The Ecologist called Ambatovy “a tale of reverse development”. That phrase earns its place. Nickel and cobalt flow out. Corporate decks glow. The villagers get the smell, the doubts, the shifted land, the broken trust and the privilege of being told there is a grievance mechanism.
Development that leaves the developed looking the other way.
Cummins’ Diesel Spine In A Green-Metal Machine
This is why Ambatovy belongs in Customer Corner.
Cummins did not invent Ambatovy’s tailings facility. Cummins did not spray the insecticide. Cummins did not move the rice farmers. Cummins did not write the EIB complaint. Cummins did not make the ammonia smell drift into residential areas.
But Cummins proudly powers the operation.
Cummins sells the muscle. Cummins sells the reliability. Cummins puts the case study on its own website and talks about economic growth and sustainability while 30 Cummins KTA50-G3 engines help keep the mine and processing system moving.
That is the stain. Not direct causation. Commercial complicity. The kind that sits quietly in the supply chain until someone bothers to read the customer list.
Customer Corner Stays Open
Ambatovy is exactly the kind of Cummins customer that makes this series necessary. A shiny case study on one side. A bruised public record on the other. Big diesel power under a green-metal story. Sustainability language sprayed over an extractive scar like air freshener in a slaughterhouse.
The generators may be reliable. The bigger picture in Madagascar remains messy as hell.
Cummins engines do not cause the sulphuric smells or the empty hives. They power the operation that does. And in TCAP’s Customer Corner, the case study never gets to stand alone.
We add the colour from the villages, the rivers, the forest, the complaints files and the people left living beside the machinery.
Madagascar deserves better than another extractive scar dressed up in sustainability language. The people breathing the air and drinking the water near Toamasina and Moramanga certainly do.
Cummins customers keep reminding us why vigilance beats glossy brochures every single time.
The generators keep turning. The slurry keeps moving. The brochures keep smiling. But the forest, the water, the bees and the people around Toamasina tell the part Cummins left out.
Customer Corner stays open. The case studies do not get the last word.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- STAMFORD P7 Alternators power Madagascar’s Ambatovy super-mine
- Ambatovy: a tale of reverse development?
- Ambatovy Nickel Project – EIB Complaints Mechanism
- EIB Conclusions Report – Ambatovy Nickel Project
- Is a Madagascan mine the first to offset its destruction of rainforest?
- Ecological compensation: more side effects than expected
- Ambatovy – official company site
- AMRI Acquires Majority Stake in Ambatovy
- Sumitomo Corp to exit Ambatovy nickel project in Madagascar