Vanilla (香草) is one of the world’s most popular spices and an important ingredient in products ranging from chocolate to perfume. However, the wholesale price of vanilla has reached up to $ 600 per kilogram, when just a few years ago it was sold at tenth of that. What is happening?

Madagascar supplies more than 80% of the world’s natural vanilla. Today, vanilla represents 20% of Madagascan exports, worth around $600 million at current prices. However, it is a difficult crop to grow. A vine takes three to four years to mature. The flowers open for just one day a year, so pollination (授粉) is done completely by hand. Nine months later, the green beans must be hand-picked when perfectly ripe to get their content. Months of processing and gradual drying in the sun are then necessary to produce the spice. Six hundred hand- pollinated blossoms yield six kilos of green beans, which can turn into one kilo of dried beans.

The price of Madagascan vanilla was once set by the government. But such were the high prices that in the 1980s buyers turned their attention to the cheaper, poorer-quality version available elsewhere, in particular Indonesia. Madagascar’s government was finally forced to end its price-fixing policy. Food giants such as Nestle and Unilever increased their use of man- made vanilla, adding to the pressure. For 30 years, Madagascar’s vanilla farmers earned just a small amount of money, and many ended up leaving the business. But even with fewer producers, the price of natural vanilla stayed low.

It was not until public tastes started shifting to all things natural that farmers’ fortunes revived. From around 2011, some producers began to focus once more on natural vanilla. In 2015, Nestle announced plans to use only natural ingredients in five years and Hershey’s followed suit. Its demand and prices have therefore rocketed in part because natural supplies are insufficient.

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