Source · farm

Madagascar vanilla farm

SAVA region, northeast Madagascar, MG

Placeholder farm entry — Madagascar grows over 80% of the world's vanilla. The flowers must be hand-pollinated within a few hours of opening (the only native pollinator is a Mexican bee); the beans cure for months on raised wooden racks, alternately sun-warmed and sweat-blanketed, until they turn from green to black and develop their full aromatic profile. The labour-to-yield ratio is brutal and the price reflects it.

Vanilla is the second-most-expensive spice in the world by weight after saffron, and almost all of it comes from a single Indian Ocean island. The crop is also one of the more political — vanilla prices swing wildly with global demand and weather, smuggling is common, and the farmers downstream of the buyers see only a fraction of the retail price.