How fortunes are being made and lost in Madagascar's vanilla boom

Updated

A vanilla boom is upending lives on the impoverished Indian Ocean island of Madagascar.

Fortunes are made and lost in a single season as the vanilla price surges to be worth more than silver.

Growers are racing to cash in before vanilla thieves strike and strip their vines bare.

On the streets of Madagascar's vanilla capital, Sambava, fast-moving hustlers trade the bean like drugs.

Watch Adam Harvey's story on Foreign Correspondent at 8 pm tonight on ABC TV

And in the heart of vanilla country, some of the rarest primates in the world — including the white lemur, or silky sifaka — hang on precariously in one of the last surviving patches of Madagascar's virgin forest.

As few as 250 of them remain.

Yockno Razafindramora is one of the Malagasy (the term refers to the people of Madagascar as well as their language) whose lives are being transformed by the vanilla boom.

He's one of his district's most respected tour guides, leading expeditions of tourists and international researchers to the mountain habitat of the silky sifaka — but he's being pulled down from the hills and back to the fields by the lure of the vanilla harvest.

"I'm jealous," he says. "I moved to Sambava but I heard and I saw that vanilla is crazy money.

"So I think I have to come back and plant more vanilla. Then I will get more money like everyone I saw here in the village."

Yockno has planted vanilla vines on every spare patch of his family's land and hopes to earn about $58 for every kilogram of green vanilla he can produce.

It's big money in a nation that produces up to 80 per cent of the world's natural vanilla, but which hangs around the bottom of global poverty lists.

A typical annual income in Madagascar is less than $500.

The green vanilla bean is harvested from the vine each July.

Cashing in on a delicate, valuable crop

"So vanilla — even if it's only once a year, it's very, very big money. So why not? I have to come back," Yockno says.

But long before Yockno sees any cash, he must exercise the lightest of touches.

Sorry, this video has expired Video: The painful process of pollinating vanilla (ABC News)

He has to hand-pollinate each vanilla orchid so it can grow into a bean. There's no native bee in Madagascar that will do the job.

Each orchid is ready for pollination on just one day of the year, for just a few hours of that day.

"The best way to pollinate is in the morning before 12 o'clock. After 12 o'clock the flower starts to be sad," says Yockno, mimicking a drooping orchid.

Hand pollination is fiendishly difficult to get right.

The technique was invented by a 12-year-old slave, Edmond Albius, on the island of Reunion in the 1840s.

It involves carefully opening an orchid, folding back part of the flower with a smooth orange thorn, and delicately pressing the male and female parts of the flower together.

If you press too hard or try to pollinate a few hours too early or late, you'll kill the orchid.

It will be four years before Yockno's vines produce a viable harvest.

Then he will take his crop to the city to try to get the best price.

New-found wealth on the streets of Sambava

As soon as growers arrive in Sambava with a bag of beans, they're met by street hustlers like Prisco a l'Appareil.

"The middleman takes it from the farmer and sells it on for them," Prisco explains.

The hustler — or middle man — is working for another trader further up the ladder and takes a small cut from the deal.

Every hustler's goal, says Prisco, is to have enough money to actually buy the crop outright from the farmer.

Trades are conducted openly, in front of dozens of other hustlers.

Prisco uses his vanilla cash to fund his real passion — music.

He's a popular local performer and his best-known song is about the vanilla traders' guild.

It includes these lines: "Don't criticise us/We're not stealing anything/We just sell what we said we'd sell/It's better to be honest."

"The reason I wrote a song about the association is because people outside it think they're better than us and we don't do anything to earn our money," Prisco says.

"Vanilla helps people earn a lot of money, not only in Madagascar, but in other parts of the world.

"I want us to be well regarded like everybody else. Even the farmers felt proud when they heard the song."

Money made on the street in Sambava is often spent as quickly as it arrives.

The town feels like one sprawling market.

Hundreds of tiny storefronts cater to the new-found wealth, selling the district's most popular luxury goods: motorbikes, speakers, amplifiers and — crucially in this nation where most villages are without power — solar panels and large-capacity storage batteries.

The World Bank says just 13 per cent of Malagasy have access to electricity.

Locals sharing in the benefits of the boom

You can smell vanilla from the car as you drive through a district of Sambava that's home to the warehouses of the vanilla exporters.

In one compound, exporters Daniel Goltran and Yohan Lajoux have just finished a big extension so they can process and store more vanilla.

"We started with a small shop and now we've managed to build this," says Goltran, whose wife's family has been growing and selling vanilla for three generations.

Inside the compound scores of local women sort piles of processed vanilla into bundles of different lengths.

Goltran says jobs like this means locals share the benefits of the boom.

"And many children nowadays go to school who would not have gone to school because the parents can now pay for the taxi to take them to school.

"They can pay for the exercise books, the backpacks and so on. So it's a very good thing for this region."

Lajoux says the business is thrilling — but it can be dangerous. Criminals are after the exporters' crop, and their money.

"Everything is paid by cash. You have to transport you own money, your cash, to the bush. The whole operation is made by cash," he said.

Once it's safely in the exporter's warehouse, after months of careful drying, a kilogram of top-quality processed vanilla sells for about $US800, up from $US80 a kilogram five years ago.

"It's the first time vanilla has been this expensive for a long time," Goltran says.

The exporters say there's a simple explanation for the high surge: a resurgent demand for natural vanilla from the food and fragrance industry, and short supply of good quality export vanilla.

No sympathy for stealthy bean thieves

It's tempting for growers to harvest their crops early, but vanilla beans harvested even two weeks early won't contain nearly as much of the crucial vanillin — the compound contained in the tiny black seeds inside the beans that carry vanilla's distinct smell and flavour.

The main reason why growers harvest early is because of the risk of theft. This is another driver of the sky-high prices.

A farmer's whole crop can be stripped from the vine overnight.

Waiting until the last moment to harvest is risky. Growers band together and spend the last two months of the season sleeping in their fields to guard the beans.

Even so, it's often not enough. A stealthy thief can get in and out before anyone spots them.

They're taking a huge risk. If thieves are caught they're badly beaten — or worse. Over the past year some thieves have been killed.

Yockno Razafindramora says he's watched community justice meted out.

"I've seen the people getting angry and aggressive. They are beating them, like taking a stick of wood and beating him … and sometimes they cut him with the knife."

Yockno doesn't have much sympathy for the thieves.

"Me, I'd do the same. If I have wood on me, I'd beat him with the big wood and if I have the machete I can beat him with that."

Gambling with unstable vanilla prices

The vanilla price has spiked and crashed before, and it's inevitable that it will happen again when all these new vanilla vines start to produce beans.

With so many people in towns like Sambava dependent on vanilla, falling prices are going to hurt.

But that's tomorrow's problem.

At a Sunday night party on Sambava's main beach, where there's not even enough electricity to power the lights, nothing can dampen the mood — not even a heavy rainstorm.

There's a queue to ride a hand-powered Ferris wheel.

There's a crowd at the roulette table. Yockno, the tour guide, dances with the locals in front of an enormous set of loudspeakers.

The people of Sambava have money in their pockets — for now — thanks to vanilla.

Watch Adam Harvey's story on Foreign Correspondent on ABC iview

Topics: trade, community-and-society, poverty, madagascar

First posted