There were six people squashed inside the battered little Renault 4 as it trundled along the bumpy dirt road to Ankadirano. In the front sat the driver and two bodyguards, while the rear seat was occupied by two young men and a middle-aged woman. The bodyguards were necessary because the woman, Seraphine Bakidy and her younger colleagues were carrying cash—six-hundred million Malagasy Francs, almost one hundred thousand US dollars. In Madagascar, where most families live on less than three hundred dollars a year, it was a king’s ransom, easily enough to get them all killed. But Seraphine and her companions had no choice. They were on a vanilla buying expedition, visiting the small-subsistence farmers dotted around the bush communities north of the main town of Antalaha.
Antalaha is the southernmost point of the triangular patch of coastline that produces more than ninety percent of Madagascar’s vanilla. Seventy miles inland to the west is Andapa, and eighty miles due north is Sambava. Another one hundred and twenty miles further north is Vohémar, the furthest point of the great island where vanilla is grown. The first letters of these towns have been put together to spell S-A-V-A, a useful shorthand for describing the fertile vanilla region. Today, about eighty thousand people here rely on vanilla for a crucial part of their earnings, and the local people have a saying: ‘everything here works because of vanilla. If the vanilla goes, the people will go’.
Renault 4’s are still probably the commonest cars in Madagascar, and the Malagasy manage to keep them going under difficult conditions for what appears to be an infinite life-span. A large number of the eight million Renault 4’s that were ever built and are still running, are on the road in Madagascar. For a long time they were the only type of cars available as taxis. For the last forty years these basic little cars have been the standard mode of transport. Seraphine Bakidy’s car was distinguished only by the fact that it was blue, whereas the vast majority of the Renaults you see are white or brown or dark green.
Seraphine and her companions had already bought almost two hundred kilograms of cured vanilla during the day. The work of negotiating with the farmers is slow and often difficult, with hours of preamble to be sat through before a price is even mentioned. The vanilla they had secured was packed into the small boot of the car, with more on the roof under a tarpaulin. At the tiny village named Masovariaka, the Renault was unexpectedly stopped by a group of villagers who had mounted a simple roadblock with tree branches laid across the dirt track. The men of the village wielded a selection of clubs, sticks, heavy stones and machetes. At least four of the villagers carried hunting rifles. As the blue Renault came to a halt, an excited mob began rocking the small car back and forth, smashing at the windows and kicking in the panels on the doors. They shouted at the occupants to get out.
Seraphine opened her door and was dragged from the vehicle, screaming at the villagers for an explanation. A strong blow to the head knocked her to the ground, where she lay unconscious with serious injuries. Left for dead by the angry crowd, she saw nothing of what happened next, as the five men she had been travelling with were all pulled from the car. The driver and the two bodyguards put up a fight and managed to flee down the road, escaping with cuts and bruises and hiding out in the thick forest until darkness fell. Seraphine’s companions on the back seat were not so lucky.
Jean de Dieu Tsarafidy and Jean Louis Sanasy were both in their early twenties, just getting started in the vanilla business and like Seraphine Bakidy they were carrying cash. The villagers beat them unconscious and tied them with thin rope around their arms and legs. Then they lynched them, and as they hung suspended like chickens from a tree, they were each shot in the chest.
The occupants of the little Renault could not have known that two days earlier another blue car had visited Masovariaka. The car pulled into the small settlement at dusk, and an armed gang terrorised the villagers, forcing them to hand over several dozen kilograms of cured vanilla. The theft was a devastating financial blow to the small community, and they were out for revenge.
When it was discovered that she was still alive, Seraphine Bakidy was given first aid by some of the women in the village, and her unconscious body despatched by bush taxi to the regional clinic at Sambava. She would spend four months in hospital recovering from her injuries. Meanwhile, the driver and the two bodyguards reached Sambava alerting Seraphine’s husband, Gilbert Gilbert, to the tragedy. Gilbert reacted fast, assembling a gang of his own and driving fast to Masovariaka. By the time he got there it was a ghost town: the inhabitants had fled into the bush. Needless to say, there was no trace of the six hundred million francs. Frustrated by the incident and enraged at finding the bodies of the two dead vanilla collectors, Gilbert Gilbert’s men set fire to the village, razing it to the ground.
On my last visit to the SAVA region, the kids were riding bicycles on the dusty streets of Antalaha. Dozens of bright, shiny mountain bikes newly imported from China that cost fifty dollars a piece, cheap by European standards but extremely expensive for Madagascar. On several small houses there were even new satellite dishes, and I had spotted several people using mobile telephones. “Oh yes, because of the vanilla prices there are a lot of rich people here now,” Georges Randriamiharisoa explained as he wrestled the steering wheel of his Landcruiser jeep to negotiate another massive pothole in the road. Georges is President of the GNEV (Groupement National des Exportateurs de Vanille de Madagascar) an organisation set up to represent vanilla dealers and to coordinate production policy in the region. He also runs one of the biggest vanilla curing operations in Antalaha, the sleepy port at the southern end of the SAVA region. Much of Madagascar’s crop takes ship here for the main exporting centre at Toamasina two days sailing down the coast. The port at Antalaha is no more than a broken down concrete jetty, but it is the only way, apart from exorbitantly priced air freight, of getting the vanilla out of the region in large quantities.
“The boom in vanilla has brought in a lot of cash,” said Georges. “A lot of the older people have bought bicycles but they just wheel them along the road—they don’t know how to work the gears. They just want people to know they have the money to buy them.”
Every jolt of the vehicle made me feel sick, and I had serious doubts that I could make it the short distance from Georges’ house to the vanilla depot without vomiting. I didn’t want to be sick in front of George, because I suspected that it was the dinner he and his wife Clarice had provided the night before that was making me feel ill. It had started innocently enough with a delicious fruit salad made with fresh paw-paws, kiwi fruit and lychees. Then came the coconut sorbet to refresh the palate before the main course. It was duck. The bird appeared on the table whole, its head and beak still attached and glazed with a rich vanilla sauce. There were blackened vanilla pods emerging from the charred beak and several more scattered throughout the slivers of meat and juice that were heaped upon my plate. Bright green uncooked vanilla leaves were strewn across the dish as garnish. There was also an enormous joint of pork studded with cloves, and Clarice had insisted that I should have a serving of each. Finally, came dessert: deep fried bananas with a syrup made from honey, sugar, rum and again, a dozen large sticks of vanilla. Clarice is a tiny birdlike woman, with enormous dark eyes and a rather imperial manner, accentuated by a penchant for richly embroidered cheong-sams. Between courses she summoned servants from the kitchen by tinkling a little brass bell which she kept at her elbow throughout the meal. Within seconds, a man in a starched white cotton jacket would appear to receive instructions from his mistress.
After a restless night disturbed by violent dreams I could barely face the idea of breakfast. Some cold cuts from the pork joint arrived at the table, and I had to confess to Clarice and Georges that I wasn’t very hungry. “It’s the heat,” Clarice shook her head pityingly. “But you must eat to keep your up your strength”. She rang her little bell, and issued some instructions to the cook who appeared silently at her side. A few minutes later I was given a plate of sliced pawpaw, its moist orange flesh dotted with small green seeds. “You must eat a few of the seeds,” Clarice commanded. “They are good for the stomach, just a few mind—they can be poisonous if you eat too many.”
“Come,” said Georges, as I mopped up the last of the pawpaw. The seeds were hard and bitter, but I convinced myself they would be an antidote to the sweet bulk of last night’s enormous feast. “We will go to the warehouse, and you will see what we have to do to keep our vanilla safe.”
Georges manages the curing plant at Antalaha for one of Madagascar’s most successful vanilla houses, the Ramanandraibe company based in the capital, Antananarivo. Working in partnership with a large American firm, they supply much of the island’s best vanilla to America and Europe. As we drove, Georges told me that with the price of vanilla at its highest ever, he had started keeping a gun in his bedroom. One of his sons who lives nearby had been shot at one night by men trying to break into his house. The men wanted to force him to open up the warehouse, so that they could steal vanilla. Fortunately, he too had a gun and was able to return fire, scaring the gang away.
The sign on the wall said Ramanandraibe Exportation, Produits et épices de Madagascar. Georges swung the Landcruiser through the gates and into the vanilla compound, waving at the group of security guards standing nonchalantly by the entrance. During daylight, their main job was to keep an eye on the staff. An open sided warehouse stretched for a hundred yards down one side of the yard, and opposite was another long building where Georges had his office. Under the porch at one end of the building there were dozens of colourful rattan baskets lined up in neat rows. Beside each bag there was a pair of rubber flip-flops. “They belong to the workers,” Georges explained. “We make them leave their lunch and personal possessions here so that they can’t hide vanilla in the bags.”
In the open-sided shed opposite the office there were dozens of women sitting at wooden tables sorting and packing vanilla beans. They sat under the shade of a sloping corrugated tin roof talking quietly as they picked through the beans in front of them. Supervisors in blue overalls moved up and down the row of tables, occasionally telling the women to stop talking and concentrate on their task. Some sections of the line had been given shade from the sun with heavy grey woollen blankets suspended from the tin roof. They flapped gently in the morning breeze.
Georges led me along the line of tables to show me the different sections of the line. “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, leaving the shelter of the verandah and heading for the far end of the compound. Behind the long warehouse was a small concrete building with a raised concrete area to one side. There were large cylindrical cane baskets lined up in neat rows, the containers for the beans when they were dipped. A trench had been cut into the floor at one end, like the pit in a car mechanic’s workshop for inspecting the underside of vehicles. Georges explained that this was where the fire was laid to heat the large tubs of water into which green beans would be dipped for the killing phase of the curing. It was the same process I had seen in Mexico, and Réunion, the only difference being that at Ramanandraibe Exports everything seemed very streamlined and efficient. Instead of an open wood fire there were tall gas cylinders arranged in the pit to feed the fire. Georges’ operation was clearly set up to handle very large quantities of vanilla beans.
Behind the dipping shed there was a fenced off garden area, where I spotted vanilla vines being trained along bamboo supports. “Do you grow vanilla here, too?”
“Oh no, these are just experimental varieties,” said Georges, leading me into the garden. It was just a few square yards of earth, but there were more than a dozen separate vines, several of them with leaves of a different size and shape than the ones I had seen elsewhere. Georges stroked a leaf from one of the vines gently between his thumb and forefinger. “This one, see it has a label –‘A55’—it gives a very high percentage of vanillin in the beans, but there is a snag. It is prone to disease, and it can’t take much sun. It’s a shame, because the vanillin content is as high as 4%, compared to the normal yields of around 2%.”
After the nursery it was time to see what Georges called the analysis centre, where a woman in a white lab coat presided over a set of digital scales, quite a lot of test tubes and petri dishes, and a machine with a label on it that said Jenway 6400 Spectrophotometer. The lady in the white coat told me it could measure the vanillin content of the beans by shooting a concentrated beam of light through them. She had some paperwork to discuss with Georges, and I stepped outside to wait in the yard.
I found myself at the edge of the compound, next to a lavatory block where two elderly men wearing the regulation issue Ramanandraibe blue overalls stood guard. Women from the vanilla shed who needed to visit the lavatory had to stand still and be frisked, airport security style, by the old men. While I was waiting two women approached, and as I watched the men caught my eye and winked lasciviously as they gave the womens’ buttocks a firm squeeze that clearly had nothing to do with finding vanilla. The women didn’t seem to mind.
Georges reappeared and led me back towards the warehouse. At one end there was a high-ceilinged room filled with shiny metal boxes, the size of large biscuit tins. These were the boxes that would be piled into containers for the long sea voyage to the USA and Europe. The room was dark and cool, but the boxes reflected the available light, capturing my image and twisting and distorting my features like funfair mirrors. I wondered how much vanilla Georges could have on site at any one time.
“Well,” he paused, as if afraid that someone could be listening. “We can have five hundred tonnes here at the peak of the season. But,” he added hurriedly as though he had said something he shouldn’t. “We try not to let so much stock stay in one spot for more than a few days.”
Even at an average price of just two hundred dollars a kilogram that would mean the vanilla here would have a retail value of one hundred million dollars on the American market. Georges could tell I was making the calculations in my head. “But see, we take precautions,” he led me to the back of the shed. The walls had been built of double thickness breezeblocks, and inside the brickwork a steel frame extended from floor to ceiling. “You would need explosives to get through that wall,” he said gravely. “And we would hear the bang. My men would be able to get here before any significant amount was stolen.” I told Georges I wasn’t planning a raid, and he gave a thin-lipped smile.
Back at Georges’ office there was a muscular man with very dark skin sitting on a plastic chair clutching a leather briefcase to his chest. His name was Justin Jao and he had bright flickering eyes and an open, intelligent face. He was one of Ramanandraibe’s vanilla collectors, just returned from a trip in the ‘bush’ as Georges termed it, and he was here to report on what he had seen. He told us that he had been gone for three weeks, travelling with four armed guards and walking into the most inaccessible areas for two or three days at a time to find the farmers who had beans to sell. I asked him how much vanilla he might collect on a typical trip.
“Before the prices went so high, maybe a tonne in ten days, but now four or five hundred kilos is all I can carry enough money for.”
Justin explained that, although he worked principally for the Ramanandraibe company, he was in effect a freelance businessman. It was up to him to make the best deal possible with the farmers in the bush. “Ramanandraibe give me a cash advance to buy vanilla beans for them, OK? But they tell me I have to use that money to buy only the best quality vanilla available. They are very strict. They want 60% of the beans to be longer than fourteen centimetres, 35% of it to be between no less than twelve centimetres, and only 5% can be shorter than that. But, if someone else will pay the same amount, or more for beans that don’t make the grade I can sell to them—then I pay Ramanandraibe’s back the cash advance they gave me.”
Georges nodded sagely as Justin explained the system. “It’s true,” he said. “I have sixty collectors, and I have to trust them to bring me back the money I advance them. Sometimes, they come back empty-handed and tell me they have been robbed, but how can I be sure?”
Justin laughed, showing a mouthful of strong yellow teeth against mottled gums. “We collectors sometimes take a chance! If Ramanandraibe rejects what we bring back we have no choice but to try to sell it to another exporter. But, we still owe Ramanandraibe their advance, or the equivalent in beans. If the other exporter knows we are desperate to sell he won’t give us a fair price and then we might not have enough to pay back the original advance.”
Curers, like Georges, also protect themselves by reserving the right to give the collectors a lower price if the beans they bring in are too moist, or not of the right quality. Georges wanted me to know that he acted strictly according to the rules, and he produced a chart, where he had listed the different grades of beans and what he expected to pay for them. The varying qualities were set down according to rules drawn up by the government, he explained, showing me a piece of paper entitled Arrete Interministeriel No 4911/99 MCC 12/5/99. There is a certain obsession with bureaucracy in Madagascar which almost thirty years of independence from French rule has done nothing to alleviate. “This means, all the exporters are treating the collectors in the same way,” Georges said defensively. “The exporters all meet once a year and agree to these rules, otherwise there would be chaos!”
The top quality of all was called ‘NFN’, meaning ‘non-fendu noir’—black not split. Beans more than fourteen centimetres long were known as ‘extra’, and there were subdivisions of grades by colour, quality and length all the way down to ‘split cuts’, short remnants of vanilla beans which had also split open. Each category had a price, and Georges was forever adjusting the figures on his chart to suit the market. “If you think the collector has a tough time,” he said. “Remember I have to deal with the foreign buyers, and they drive a hard bargain too. You see, they have different uses for the beans,” he continued. “If they are just making vanilla extract then it doesn’t matter if the beans are shorter, or split, because they will pulverise them and heat them anyway, to extract the flavour. But the gourmet grade beans for chefs, and for the high quality ingredients market, they have to look as good as possible. And they must taste as good as they expect of a real Bourbon bean.”
I asked Justin if the farmers were happy with the very high price they had been getting recently. His coal dark eyes flickered from side to side.
“They are happy of course, but they always ask me why the price is so high now. Until a few years ago the government set the price for vanilla and it stayed the same for more than twenty years. They don’t understand the free market, only that they can ask for more money. Now they wait until later and later in the season to sell the beans so that they can get a better price, and some of them are starting to hoard. But many are too scared to keep the vanilla in their house.”
“Yes,” Georges interrupted. “But another problem we have is that some farmers are picking too early. They don’t want the risk of someone stealing the beans, but it means the quality of the flavour is not so good.”
“Don’t the beans need to stay on the vine for a long time to ripen?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” Georges nodded vigorously. “But after two months they have already reached their maximum weight and length. And we buy by weight in the first instance. Of course the farmer gets a good price per kilo, but the quality of the flavour is very poor unless it is allowed to stay on the vine for at least six, preferably eight months. That’s where the special Bourbon taste comes from and that’s what the foreign buyers want. They don’t care what price I’ve had to pay to the farmers.”
Meanwhile, the problems of security and a volatile price for vanilla were causing the same problems for the farmers and the curers that I had seen in Mexico. I told Georges a little of what I had seen there. “We also try to make rules,” he said shaking his head as if it was a hopeless task. “We have imposed curfews, no-one is allowed to drive a car with vanilla on board after six p.m. And you can go to prison for selling someone else’s beans.” He rummaged in his desk drawer and produced a little wooden stamp studded with fine pins. “This is my personal mark, the vanilla council has registered these four letters ‘AOXA’ in my name. I prick the beans I grow with this as soon as they are big enough, and this is supposed to mean no-one else can sell them.”
“Does it work?”
Georges raised his palms upwards and shrugged. “With this crazy money around, nothing is guaranteed. If a curer is offered beans at a very good price it can be hard to say no.”
As President of the Vanilla Exporters Association, Georges was desperately concerned to help the farmers maintain Madagascar’s reputation for producing the highest quality vanilla in the world. He told me that two years previously, representatives from the European Union had visited his factory and asked if he could find forty farmers to whom some basic financial aid could be given. Within a year he had established one hundred groups representing fourteen thousand farmers, all of whom were committed to protecting the quality standards for which Bourbon vanilla is known. In small ways the Exporters Association was achieving success. “We found that the farmers were trying to increase their profits by semi-curing the beans they had for sale,” Georges explained. “They were storing them in plastic bags as a way of heating them rapidly—but plastic makes the beans go mouldy. We have used the EU money to distribute 60,000 blankets for the farmers to use for the sweating process instead of plastic.” The GNEV also distributed thermometers and timers so that the farmers could monitor the sweating process more accurately. It all sounded encouraging, but Georges remained downbeat.
“Maybe we can achieve something in the long term, but I’m afraid that people are too interested in making quick money. And you know, in the last few years we in Madagascar have had cyclones, and a sort of civil war to cope with as well. It’s not easy.”
In the afternoon, Georges had work to do, and I was left to explore the compound on my own. The open yard between the offices and the warehouse was made of concrete and unbearably hot. I retreated to the covered verandah of the warehouse where the women were sorting and packing the dried vanilla. They had upturned packing cases for chairs and I asked if I could occupy a spare place at one of the long table. The five women working there were mostly young, shy and nervous, giggling and casting their eyes downwards if I spoke to them. Most of them wore their hear in tight plaits which they curled up onto the top of their heads so that it was out of their way as they worked. Their braids were dressed with coconut oil so that they shone like woven vanilla beans. Their fingers were as nimble as weavers’, flickering over the pile of dark brown pods on a grey woollen blanket laid across the table. The cured beans were stacked in neat circular bunches and bound with pale strips of raffia which they tied with neat little bows around the middle. The rolls, each containing a hundred pods, looked like miniature bundles of kindling. The oil on the surface of the beans caught the light and made them glisten, and some of the vanilla had a reddish tinge, like stray ginger hairs in a dark man’s beard. The women’s fingernails and the skin around their cuticles had been died black by the pods. One of the women told me that they were paid about three dollars a day for working with the vanilla.
“Is that a good wage?”
“Oh yes,” there was general assent. “We would get half that if we worked with cloves or rice.”
There was a hypnotic appeal in watching the sorters going about their task. They spoke in hushed tones, casting occasional glances towards the supervisors who walked up and down the line of tables. I began to talk very quietly too, and it felt like being back at school, afraid of being caught by a teacher. One woman, Angelina, was slightly more forthcoming than the rest, and after a time she asked shyly if I could answer a question. She said that she, and her colleagues, had been told that vanilla was worth a lot of money outside Madagascar.
“If this is true, we don’t understand what the vazaha do with the vanilla,” she said, using the Malagasy word for stranger, and which they apply to any foreigner. “Why do they pay so much for it?”
I tried to explain that it was the taste and smell of vanilla that made it valuable. Angelina’s eyes widened. “Is that all?”
The women clearly doubted what I had said, staring at each other with suddenly serious expressions. It was clear they thought I was lying, and I felt as if I had let them down with my explanation. None of them would look at me. They talked animatedly for a while in their own language, clearly debating whether what I had told them could make any sense, but nervous about pressing their enquiry. Finally, it was Angelina who spoke to me again. “We believe there must be another reason,” she said, staring at the ground. “Is it because you can make dynamite with it?”
“No, it is really for food. When we vazaha cook, we like to add vanilla just because it is a special taste. And we cannot grow it in our country. That is why vanilla from Madagascar is so important. It is the best in the world.”
The compliment to Madagascar brought forth a round of smiles, and the atmosphere improved again. In this region, where rain is plentiful and the soil is fertile, people have not endured poverty and hardship like those further south. With fish and rice, fruit and vegetables in good supply there is no malnutrition here and the local ethnic group, the Betsimisaraka tribe are better off than most. They are also the most skilful at growing and curing the vanilla, which has recently become such a big earner. Vanilla is not, however, something the Betsimisaraka ever use in their own cooking, and the women still doubted that foreigners would pay a lot of money for the beans.
“What about tyres, do they use vanilla to make tyres for their cars?”
A klaxon sounded to signal the end of the working day, and Angelina and her colleagues began to tidy away their work. The supervisors moved down the line of tables collecting the last bundles of tied beans to return them to the safety of the warehouse. The women began to troop out of the warehouse, gathering near to the main gates to be frisked again before they left for home. Then they picked up their little rattan bags and ambled through the gates like factory workers anywhere at the end of a tiring shift. As I waited for Georges, the compound seemed very quiet and still, but the smell of the vanilla hung over everything like a sweet cloud.