ALBERTO ROJAS
@ rojas1977
Sunday, November 3, 2019 - 02:11
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Supermarket shelves with promises of ice cream, cereals, candles, yogurts, cakes, porridge, perfumes, flavored beers, incenses, spirits, infusions, chocolates or cookies and thus up to 18,000 products that advertise vanilla on their label ... but do not carry vanilla , because if they took it, instead of those laboratory extracts that are used as a substitute they would be worth 100 times more. Less than 1% of vanilla-flavored products actually carry real vanilla pods. In fact, the vast majority of us have not taken anything to do with the authentic taste (and smell) of this spice for many years.
Behind this cost of one of the most expensive raw materials in Africa there are several factors: deforestation, typhoons, illegal traffic and lack of rain have turned vanilla pods into a product that has surpassed purchased silver by weight It is one of the most unstable merchandise in the world.
To understand this increase and that shortage you have to travel to the island of Madagascar, the corner of the planet where the most precious vanilla is grown, the most tasty (better than the one extracted in Mexico and which was discovered for Europe by Hernán Cortés) and also the one that defends itself even with life. 85% of the vanilla fields on Earth are now in Madagascar and 50% of this spice ends up in the European continent . In the year 2000 a hurricane swept Madagascar and most of the crops. In 2017, cyclone Enawo did the same. If a plant takes three to four years to bear fruit, buyers were faced with a huge shortage of vanilla . And at that moment the dead began.
85% of the vanilla fields on Earth are in Madagascar today and 50% of this spice ends up in the European continent
There is a war of vanilla that enriches traffickers , impoverishes the growers and tombs an economy that was based on their production, with 70,000 million dollars of profit per year but that barely reaches the inhabitants of one of the countries with an economy weakest in the world, with 76% of the population living in conditions of extreme poverty.
Up to 80,000 farmers in Madagascar work to obtain more vanilla than the rest of the world , but also to defend their plantations from pirates and traffickers sometimes 24 hours a day with artisanal weapons, hunting shotguns, spears, simple machetes and other primitive weapons . The pods are marked, as if it were a barcode, with a stamp from each grower that can be a serial number or its own name.
Being an engraving on the floor, it resists its drawing until after drying. That way they can know who is behind the thefts. When they capture a thief or gang of thieves, the so-called "popular justice" is launched, which is a lynching of a mob that usually ends with death . The authorities often stop environmentalists without contemplation as a real danger for an activity that feeds the island, but also its mafias.
Armed gangsters
Even so, daily assaults and deaths occur without anyone being able to end a criminal activity that is related to the price increase . At more risk, more cost. From 20 dollars that cost a kilo six years ago we have gone to 600 dollars for that same amount today, which is approximately what an average worker in Madagascar charges.
Another reason for the price increase is the purchase of industrial quantities of vanilla by large food corporations, which have multiplied the demand, while the supply of collapse. Hershey, Nestlé, Mars, Danone, Veolia or the firm of perfumes Firmenich have acquired a large number of real pods and have increased prices, which, on the other hand, they should avoid. These companies are acquiring the raw material directly from farmers' cooperatives to avoid the action of thieves and mafias.
This open war over crops makes an already valuable product more expensive. The vanilla plant is a type of climbing orchid that can reach 90 meters in length. Its sap is stinging and each stem can house several corsages of eight to 10 flowers, with about 100 flowers in total. Those flowers are inaccessible to most insects. There was a type of bee in Mexico that was capable of reaching vanilla pollen, but it does not exist in Madagascar.
700 flowers are needed to complete a kilo of vanilla
The consequence is that pollination must be done by hand . The difficulty of this process is joined by another: the white flower of this orchid only blooms one day a year and its flower is only fertile for a few hours. Farmers should introduce a thin stick, lift the membrane that divides the male and female part of the flower and press them together so that the flower is fertilized. This operation must be multiplied by the number of flowers of each plant, which can be about one hundred. You have to wait nine months for the fruit to ripen. 700 flowers are needed to complete a kilo of vanilla.
Three more months
When all pods are collected, you have to find a buyer and do it quickly. The plant rots at full speed . That crop still does not taste like vanilla or smell as such. We will have to wait three more months for it to heal and dry. Then, rolled up by hundreds of women in factory buildings and tied with a simple rope, they are prepared to put them in vacuum in a plastic and from there to export.
Many growers collect their harvest when the pods are still very green , before the thieves arrive to keep all their work, although the system is also used by speculators to keep it hidden longer and thus be able to sell it when prices rise. To avoid this, the Government of Antananarivo, the capital, has determined fixed dates for cultivation and harvesting, although they are rarely met.
Those who really make money with this jewel of botany, cooking and baking are the intermediaries and exporters, called "vanilla", those who make millions with vanilla. Meanwhile, what has been sold in many places as a substitute for authentic vanilla is vanillin , an aromatic compound that has been working since the 19th century on the basis of coal, rice, tar, wood and even cow dung and is, Of course, much cheaper than the real spice.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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