The Price Behind The Soaring Price Of Madagascar Vanilla
Jan 09, 2020| The price behind the soaring price of Madagascar vanilla
In Madagascar, soaring vanilla prices have a bittersweet cost
ON A RECENT SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN Sahabevava village, on the east coast of Madagascar,
vanilla farmer Lydia Soa wielded a small wooden stamp studded with steel pins spelling out her producer number: MK021.
Soa, 46, had recently branded thousands of green vanilla pods at her small plantation with this unique code.
If a thief steals her crop, it can be traced at the local market.
“Now I can sleep at night,” she says.
These days vanilla theft is a big business.
Climate change, crime and speculation have led to skyrocketing prices of the fragrant spice, from $20 per kilo five years ago to $515 in June.
A pair of tropical cyclones wiped out a third of 2017’s crop in Madagascar—
which supplies 80% of the world’s vanilla—and sent the global price soaring.
A byword for boring, vanilla tends to be taken for granted.
Yet without it, cookies lose their zing, creme brulee its flare and Calvin Klein’s Obsession its sweet, woody base.
And without vanilla, some 80,000 farmers in Madagascar—one of the poorest countries in the world—would lose their livelihood.
High prices rarely benefit the small family farmers whose futures depend on the fickle fruit.
Vanilla, which blooms only once a year, for one day, has to be pollinated by hand, and the fruit takes nine months to mature.
New vanilla vines take three years to mature, and at a dollar per bean,
farmers have to contend with thieves who snatch the just-before-ripe pods straight from the vines,
knowing they will still fetch a decent price.
Some farmers have responded by harvesting their crops early,
flooding the market with low-quality beans that lack the intense flavor that emerges just before the mid-July harvest.
The quality plummets, and so does the price.
Farmers tear out their vines in frustration, until the price climbs again, creating a vicious cycle of vanilla boom and bust.
Although most people would struggle to tell the difference between real vanilla and artificial flavoring,
consumers are increasingly demanding natural products in their food.
That’s why Mars Inc., Danone, and Firmenich, the world’s largest privately owned flavor and fragrance supplier,
have invested $2 million in a fund to stabilize a crop most people don’t even think about—
part of a growing trend of food companies’ streamlining their supply chain.
Through the Livelihoods Fund for Family Farming,
they have partnered with an NGO to provide farmers with vanilla seedlings,
teach them sustainable practices that avoid the slash-and-burn methods of traditional agriculture and organize neighborhood vanilla-watch programs.
They are also supplying farmers with the antitheft stamps.
Vanilla thieves now face up to four years in jail.
To Soa, that’s not enough.
She wants a life sentence.
“You invest all your life in growing the vanilla.
Stealing it is the same thing as killing someone.”