A barefoot farmer is making his way through a forest.
Quiet drops of rain tumble steadily through the night, picked out in the light from his torch.
The rusty machete he holds isn’t for cutting down vines or chopping away stubborn branches - it is a defence against thieves.
Lots of other men - farmers like him - are out in the rain, patrolling the forest. For the past three months, they have left their homes every night and made the long journey into the plantations to protect their crop.
But this is not an illegal coca plantation, or anything like it. In fact, these farmers are growing a crop whose name is a byword for something boring.
The men need weapons to guard against robbers who roam the countryside looking for one thing - Madagascan vanilla.
[...]
The village is full of music. Upbeat dance melodies blare through the sheer, pink curtain covering the doorway of Leon’s home - a rectangular, wooden structure with a peaked roof.
Here, the forest meets the sea and the high humidity, shade, and moderate temperatures make it perfect for growing vanilla.
Each vine that Leon prunes holds pods - also known as beans - that will eventually retail for more than $150 (£120), once they are dried.
To deter theft, all the farmers in the surrounding area are stamping their names, or sometimes serial numbers, on to individual pods while they’re still on the vine. Even when the pods are dried, the markings can be made out.
[...]
Thousands of miles away in London, Oddono’s ice cream shop is tucked between a pizza parlour and a cafe on a busy street in South Kensington.
There’s a plethora of awards on one wall. The owners boast of the finest natural ingredients in their authentic Italian gelato: Valrhona chocolate from France, pistachios from Sicily, hazelnuts from Piedmont.
But last year, one variety of ice cream was missing.
“When I told customers that we didn’t have any vanilla ice cream, many of them were shocked,” says Christian Oddono, who manages the shop.
“I had to explain that we didn’t want to give them bad quality products but also we were never going to use chemicals. Then, they understood.”
The price for last year’s Madagascan vanilla crop was sky high, but Christian found the quality of what he was getting so low that he took vanilla ice cream off his menu.
“The pods had too much moisture in them and some even had a mouldy smell - a sign that the curing process wasn’t done properly,” he says.
“This year I found another, better supplier in Madagascar. The prices are still high, so we’ve had to raise our prices as well, but our customers haven’t complained.
We see a general trend of more customers wanting to eat more authentic food and shying away from chemicals and lab-produced substitutes.”
[...]
And there is more and more pressure on food companies to switch from artificial vanilla to vanilla beans. Big corporations such as Hershey and Nestle have started buying natural vanilla extract for their products in large quantities, which injects more demand into the limited supply chain and raises prices further.
[...]
French colonists first brought vanilla to Madagascar’s neighbouring island of Réunion in the early 19th Century. It grows as a clinging vine, reaching lengths of up to 300ft (90m).
The vines grow well outside Mexico - but no fruit, in the form of vanilla beans, was produced. Horticulturists eventually discovered what was missing.
The pollen on a vanilla orchid flower is inaccessible to most insects, including typical honey bees. The small Melipona bee, which lives in only Mexico, was the only one able to reach the vanilla pollen and fertilise the flowers. Still, relying on the bees for pollination is a hit-and-miss affair as the pale white orchids bloom for just one day each year and the flower is fertile for only eight to 12 hours after it blooms.
On Réunion, an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius invented a painstaking way of pollinating by hand.
A sharp, thin stick is used to lift the fragile membrane between the male and female parts of the flower, which are then pushed into each other for pollination to occur. This has to be done for every single flower on every vine in order to produce the fruit - vanilla pods filled with thousands of the tiny black seeds we eventually see in high-quality vanilla ice cream.
Madagascan farmers have to check their plants every morning. If a farmer misses the fertilisation window for a flower, or damages the plant, he loses out on precious pods - it takes about 600 blossoms pollinated by hand to produce just 1kg of cured vanilla beans.
After pollination, it takes nine months for the vanilla pods to mature - then, they are harvested.
[...]
Arman Ramarokootonirina has been working as a middleman buying up vanilla from farmers in Maroantsetra for more than seven years. Commissionaire Arman Ramarokootonirina
Commissionaire Arman Ramarokootonirina
There are many unscrupulous new entrants into the industry, he says. It is now flush with cash. “It is the greed of the big bosses that is causing the problem. People get big advances yet they haven’t even planted any vanilla. Then they have to steal it from other people’s gardens to fulfill the orders.”
But for the growers who are able to protect their crops, the high vanilla prices mean one good harvest can be life-changing.
A kilogram of cured beans is worth $400-$500 - a hefty sum in a country where the average annual per capita income is $1,500.
In the village of Ambanizana, you can see the vanilla money at work. Parents are able to send their children to bigger, better schools outside the village. Modern brick houses are springing up where traditional wooden houses once stood.
[...]
Disappearing trees
[...]
Saplings have sprung up between charred stumps of ancient trees. The trees that were chopped down were more than 100 years old. The clearing is not very big, but as Armand explains, the problem is that there are patches like this all over the place.
Trees and forest that are cut down cannot grow back the same way again - it would take hundreds of years. When this sort of damage occurs, a fragile ecosystem is disrupted. Lemurs will no longer have food here. Plants, insects and animals that relied on a delicate balance start to disappear.
People in Madagascar are worried about its vanilla losing its reputation - but in the national park a fragile ecosystem is being badly damaged to cater for global demand.
It is short-sightedness.
As trees start to disappear, the unique conditions that make this a perfect place to grow vanilla will start to disappear as well. The forests provide the right amount of rainfall, humidity and soil to grow Madagascar’s coveted brand of vanilla.
[...]
Francois Ravelonjara, a vanilla farmer in Maroansetra, wears an air of resignation as he stamps a serial number on to vanilla pods in his small farm.
Farmer Francois Ravelonjara
The number corresponds to one in his carte de planteur de vanille, a registration document distributed to vanilla growers by the government to prove ownership and curb theft.
The markings have not prevented thieves from raiding his plot twice already.
"It would be better if the prices went down again,” he says. “We didn’t make much - but at least we did not live in fear.”
Many long-term growers and traders echo that sentiment. Much like the blooming of the vanilla orchid flower, they know the current boom will not last very long. But the effects of it will.
how about that writing! Who said there couldn't be beauty in simple words. Yup, i know it's Trump's way, but this wasn't at all the same. Except for the thieves bits.
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