How did hunger for the humble pod lead to greed, crime and riches? A trip to Madagascar reveals the new spice barons
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When Raminisoa returned from the north she built a curing hut on the slope behind her parents’ house. “You have to have everything prepared,” she says. “Charcoal to heat the water, large pots, blankets and drying racks. In the north they have a special song they sing, about paying attention, about having patience.” Working with vanilla, she explains, “needs discipline and passion”.
Over the past two years, despite thefts, a drought in 2016 and rain during the drying period last season, Raminisoa’s family has earned more than $20,000 in a country where the average income is less than a dollar a day. Previously the family scratched a bare living from growing bananas, coffee and rice. The vanilla boom has enabled them to buy a cow, a new electricity dynamo and a rice-planting machine that they hope to rent out.
Artificial vanilla was developed around the same time. Nearly 200 molecules give vanilla its subtle flavour. Artificial vanilla synthesises just one of these – vanillin. This used to be obtained from cheaper products such as cloves and wood . The development of artificial vanilla went hand in hand with the industrialisation of food production in the mid-to-late 19th century.
Even within rural regions in this small nation there are clear variations in wealth. In the Central Highlands, where the hills are terraced into rice paddies, hand-pulled rickshaws are the main form of transport in the towns. When I flew north, to the heart of vanilla county, I could see new fleets of yellow motorised tuk-tuks. On the drive, I noticed fancy new “vanilla mansions”.
After the market was liberalised – but before the current boom – exporters generally set the price of vanilla. They weighed the expected global demand against the size and quality of a harvest. But as demand rose, many collectors – the middle men in the system – tried to pay low prices to growers while selling to exporters for much more. By 2017, some exporters were paying exorbitant sums for poor quality beans. As the price mounted, speculation and stock-piling became rife.
Rosewood is a beautiful hardwood that grows abundantly in the forests of Madagascar’s national parks in the Sava region. It is prized for its deep-red hue, particularly by furniture-makers in China. Logging from national parks is illegal but has always been carried out on a small scale. But after storms toppled many trees in 2007, Madagascar’s president granted export licences to several traders to buy wood felled by “acts of god”.
Over the past four seasons, Virginia Dare has worked directly with a farmers’ co-operative in the village of Belambo, north of Sambava, to ensure that they have a reliable supply of vanilla. They pay farmers a fair price and train a new generation to cure the stuff. Belambo is 18km from the paved road, and takes an hour to reach on the back of a dirt bike. Chickens peck at scraps; zebu, a species of humped cattle, loll under jackfruit trees.
When I ask the women how their lives have changed since the vanilla boom, they laugh as if to say “not much”. Juliette shows me her kitchen, a low hut adjacent to the house, and squats down to add more wood to the fire under a big stew pot, coughing and squinting to show me how uncomfortable and smoky the unventilated space was. But, she says, they eat much better food now. For the first time they can buy yogurt in the village.
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