By April 2000, supply and demand had achieved a precarious equilibrium, but then Cyclone Hudah destroyed a fifth of the year's harvest. Spurred on by American buyers, exporters tried to secure supplies before prices rose. And rise they did, from single digits to $70 a pound in 2000. Adventurers looking to make their fortunes swelled the ranks of middlemen. Suddenly, desperately poor farmers were buying cellphones and mountain bikes, feeding their families meat, and guarding their vanilla like gold.
But the newfound prosperity has had unpleasant side effects. "Families sleep in their vanilla plantations right up until harvest to ward off thieves, who are often armed," an agricultural technician told me.
In the year 2000, high prices and fear of theft led farmers to harvest their beans months early, even though the resulting product tasted more like pencil shavings than vanilla. Moreover, these immature beans yielded a much lower ratio of finished vanilla than ripe pods. The upshot was that American and European buyers of the 2000 crop faced shockingly high prices and poor quality. A year later, the Malagasy government stepped in and decreed that no vanilla could be picked or sold before July 15, a month after the normal starting date. As I absorbed all this information, my head began to spin. Deep in the bush, it was said, everyone was harvesting their beans. A few growers were openly curing their vanilla, and rumors of bribes abounded. But who knew the real facts? Eventually, I came to understand why I'd been stonewalled at almost every turn: The last thing that growers and processors needed was an American journalist documenting their illicit haul. My Madagascar dream dissolved into shades of noir: competing ethnicities, market manipulation, and webs of deceit.
Having given up on finding out the full truth of the situation, I set out to tour the Vanilla Research Station, west of the old capital and vanilla trading port of Antalaha. I went there with Jean Déquaire, an 80-year-old French horticulturist who had joined the establishment soon after its founding in 1955 and was heading it when the last French were driven out in 1974. He had tried to breed improved vanilla varieties to replace the standard clone that accounts for the bulk of world production.
But the research center was little more than a memory. A machete-carrying watchman, who smiled when he saw the old Frenchman, accompanied us through the ruins. At the shadehouse, which once sheltered the world's greatest collection of vanilla varieties and species, Déquaire recognized some of the hybrids he had worked with decades ago. He murmured to them as if they were old friends encountered for the very last time.
"Madagascar, c'est foutu," said Déquaire, gruff but loquacious as the pain of years of unrewarded effort spilled out. "Decolonization was a total disaster. You see now the ruins of paradise."
The Malagasy, naturally, have another view. Vy, a sly philosophy major and occasional Elvis impersonator who was making a living as a guide, said, "Perhaps we'd be better off economically if we were still sucking at the teat of France, but it's more important that we have our independence and our pride."
In the months since my return, the tension and killings in the vanilla districts have continued. And political turmoil resulting from a disputed election has further damaged Madagascar's chancy economy. The 2001 vanilla crop, though of excellent quality, proved smaller than expected, so prices surged past $100 per pound. Two beans in a glass tube, $1.25 retail three years ago, now bring $4 or more, but demand has dropped as manufacturers reformulate their products with artificial vanillin.
The future is wildly uncertain. Right now, tens of thousands of acres of vanilla, planted in Madagascar in the aftermath of Hudah, are being harvested, and prices will undoubtedly plunge. Cooks in America and Europe will rejoice, while the Malagasy growers may come to know, yet again, the bitterness of poverty.
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