Henry Todd is tall, dark and quite handsome. His hair is thick, and cut short to reveal a widow’s peak. Fit and slim, and his tropical lightweight suit hangs immaculately from his broad shoulders. On his feet there are suede Gucci brogues and under his jacket there is a crisp Jermyn Street shirt. The porter at the door of the Madagascar Hilton knows him well, and immediately arranges to pay for the taxi that has brought him from the airport. The porter understands that Todd rarely carries any cash, mainly because he travels too frequently to bother exchanging his coins and notes for local currency. Todd has only one small piece of luggage: he visits the hotel so regularly that they allow him to leave a set of clothes here. The women behind the reception desk at the Madagascar Hilton all smile broadly at M’sieur Todd, handing him the key to his room with the minimum of formalities. Henry is the scion of the family run company that buys almost half of all the vanilla beans in the world.
It is February, and after much negotiation, Todd has agreed to let me travel with him to the SAVA region while he investigates the state of the vanilla crop. It has taken a long time to arrange this trip, since Henry is constantly travelling. In an average year he will make between fifty and seventy long-haul flights, and as many short hops to visit clients within the USA and Europe. His working life is a constant, and punishing, round of regular visits to Paris, London, Philadelphia, Chicago and other regional cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps eight times a year he will be in Madagascar, a journey that will always involve time in Antananarivo as well as flights to Antalaha, Sambava and perhaps Vohémar. He will make the same number of visits to India and Indonesia, and occasional visits to Uganda and the Comoros. Few of these places can be reached with a single flight. To reach Madagascar he often flies overnight from Europe to Johannesburg, picking up a three hour connecting flight to Antananarivo. Sometimes he arrives via Mauritius, or Nairobi. Each year, Henry Todd spends around $200,000 on his airline tickets alone, and he told me once that he had accumulated about one million air miles on his account with British Airways alone.
The firm that he works for is called Zink & Triest, an old established firm of vanilla dealers acquired by the Todd family in the 1960’s. For several years now, Henry has been responsible for acquiring the vanilla that Zink & Triest imports into the USA. In the trade he is known as Henry ‘Junior’, since his father, ‘Henry Senior’, did the same job for many years and now manages operations from the company headquarters in Pennsylvania. Zink & Triest import vanilla beans and then sell them to extract producers, to flavourists and in some cases directly to food and beverage manufacturers. They will never discuss whom their individual clients might be, but it is safe to say that there are few people using natural vanilla who have not done business with Zink & Triest.
Henry greets me with a warm handshake. We have met before, but on a rather formal basis, and I know he is wary of revealing too much about the vanilla trade. “Hi Tim, glad you could get here”, he says cheerfully. “We’ll catch up later. Right now I have a meeting in town with some important people. I just had a phone call about it when I was coming in from the airport”. As we are talking, two Malagasy men in suits come through the swing doors and greet Henry in French. He is bilingual in English and French, and generally talks rapidly in both languages. He tells them he will drop his bags in his room and five minutes later I see him depart with the men in a four wheel drive vehicle with smoked glass windows. Later that day I learn that his important meeting was with President Ravalomanana. Interestingly, the president’s office had turned down my repeated requests for an interview for the BBC, saying that he was preparing to go abroad the very next day and wasn’t able to see anyone. However, it seemed he could clear his diary for the world’s biggest vanilla dealer. That night I received a phone call from Henry Todd telling me to be ready to leave Antananarivo early the next morning. We would be going north to visit some vanilla growers.
The coterie of vanilla dealers who dominate the international market are all well known to one another. Their club is a small one, where contact is unavoidable, and face to face business relationships are kept cordial. As I learnt more about the business, and the men who run it, something became clear. Rumours and counter rumours are a significant part of vanilla brokerage. It is partly why the brokers keep their movements as secretive as possible.
In Madagascar, Mexico, India and Indonesia the farmers spread rumours about the amount of vanilla they think will be available during the next season. They hope to frighten the curers into offering them a better price for green beans. In turn, the curers spread rumours among the farmers about how much the foreign buyers are willing to pay for the dried product. They want to make the farmers believe that it is the foreign buyers who set the price, rather than themselves. Meanwhile, the international brokers spread what they call ‘market intelligence’ to their customers about how much vanilla may or may not be available during the forthcoming year. It often suits the smaller buyers to exaggerate the effect that their larger rivals are having upon the price. They can blame other dealers for paying too much or too little for vanilla, claiming that it is the largest dealers who make the market. And among the small band of international vanilla buyers, the men who import the cured vanilla into the developed world, there is always time for a little gossip.
As I got to know more and more of these major dealers, the cracks in the brotherhood began to show. On many occasions I was told that there was only one reason for the recent and ongoing crisis in the vanilla market. “It’s Zink and Triest,” other brokers would whisper discretely, and always with the admonition that they must never be quoted. “Let’s face it, Z&T have more cash than anyone else—it’s in their interest for the market to go sky-high. No-one else has the money to compete with them. They’ve been encouraging the price rises, so that they can force everyone else to the wall—then they’ll corner the market.”
If I pressed them further, some dealers would get personal. “It’s Henry ‘Junior,” said one. “He’s behind all this.” The thesis seemed to be that Todd was a young man, eager to make his mark in the industry by fair means or foul. Apart from a vague supposition that it might be in Zink & Triest’s interest to drive their competitors out of business, there didn’t seem to be anything more specific behind the claims. However, the awe with which these rivals spoke of Henry ‘Junior’ made me curious. I wanted to learn more about the background to the Todd family’s dominance of the vanilla world.
On a cold winter’s day I took a plane from Chicago over a frozen Lake Michigan to reach the small mid-western town of Kalamazoo. The southern end of the vast lake was a milk white gathering of mammoth sized ice shards and the streets of Kalamazoo were slithery with slush. It is an average sized town, with a university and a strong sense of community spirit, somewhat burdened by its faintly comical sounding name. At the small airport at Battle Creek the newsagent was selling souvenir mugs, tee shirts and pencils with the slogan: “Yes! There really is a Kalamazoo.” The town might have remained more obscure had it not been for the popular Glen Miller song, “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” featured in the 1942 film ‘Orchestra Wives’ and which was nominated for an Oscar. It didn’t win, although the lyricist Mack Gordon may have taken some solace from the fact that he lost to Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ at the 1943 ceremony.
Henry Todd’s great great grandfather was one of Kalamazoo’s most prominent citizens. The company he set up in 1869 still has its headquarters in Kalamazoo, and I had come to learn something about the dynasty that has come to dominate the vanilla trade. Albert May Todd had nothing to do with the tropical vine, but he built a considerable fortune on another plant: mint.
Albert Todd was one of ten children born to a New England family who could trace their stock back to a Yorkshireman called Christopher Todd, who arrived in the colony in 1638. He married into a family of successful bakers and the family have stayed with food ever since. When Albert May Todd was born in 1850 his family was living in Michigan, where the cultivation of mint was a well established industry. As a teenager, Todd began experimenting with growing his own crops, learning how to distil the oil, which in the nineteenth century was still regarded as a virtual panacea. Peppermint flavoured lozenges were a standby in any medicine chest and Spirit of Mint was regarded as a cure for flatulence, colic and even depression. The process of mint oil extraction was comparatively simple, requiring little more than a large copper boiler in which fresh mint would be steamed and the oil collected by condensation. Mint production spread in tandem with the expanding population of the north eastern United States as settlers travelled west and up into Michigan in search of farmland. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Midwest’s production of mint oil was a big enough business for excess production to be shipped back to Europe.
In 1869, at the aged of nineteen, Albert Todd formed the ‘Nottawa Steam Refined Essential Oil Works” in collaboration with his elder brother, Oliver. One of the factors affecting the price that could be fetched for mint oil was its purity. Albert concocted a steam jet system for further refining the oil, and the Todd’s ‘Crystal White Oil of Peppermint’ acquired a reputation for excellence and reliably good quality. The brothers made enough money to allow Albert to attend Illinois University in 1873, where he studied chemistry. However, the strain of studying while keeping an eye on the business was apparently too much for him and Albert became ill, undertaking a voyage to Europe in 1874 to recuperate. The voyage evidently provided a cure, since young Albert was able to undertake an extensive walking tour, during which he visited eight countries.
The trip greatly influenced his subsequent career, both financially and culturally. On a visit to England he discovered a variety of mint that was not being cultivated in the USA, a strain known as Black Mitcham, from Surrey. He brought some cuttings of the new mint back to Michigan and quickly found that it was hardier than the plants already in cultivation. With his background in chemistry, Albert Todd continued to perfect his method of distilling mint oil that yielded a purer product than any of his rivals. In 1876, Albert Todd exhibited his wares at the Centennial Exposition of the United States, held in Philadelphia to celebrate a hundred years of independence from Britain. Todd was awarded a medal for his “Crystal White Double Distilled Oil of Peppermint”, and a cash prize which he invested in some rare books. It was the beginning of a library and an art collection that would eventually become something of an obsession with the mint grower.
On a snow filled morning in Kalamazoo I found myself in front of a classic red brick Art Deco industrial building on Douglas Avenue. A fine collegiate style entrance led into a small foyer. There on the wall was an oil painting of the man himself, Albert May Todd, the man they called “The Peppermint King.” Painted in 1918, it shows him sitting in a finely carved armchair and wearing a sombre three piece suit, with wing collar and a dark bow-tie. This is no soulless portrait of a captain of industry: his features are thoughtful and in his right hand there is a book, his forefinger marking the page as if he has just been interrupted while reading poetry. The portrait and the panelled walls combined to make the lobby feel more like the entrance to a gentlemen’s club in New York, than part of a provincial factory. There was something else unexpected about this place, it actually smelled of mint.
The Todd building is not normally open to the public, but my visit had been arranged in advance. A fresh blast of mint-scented air filled the lobby as a panelled door swung open and Ian Blair, a former Vicepresident of the Todd company emerged to give me a tour. Ian had married into the Todd family, eventually rising to the post of financial controller for the company. “I’m officially retired now”, Ian explained. “But I guess I’ve become something of a company historian over the years. Let me show you around.”
Behind the reception area there was a network of corridors leading to a more modern extension to the building where the mint business was located. I had to wear a white lab coat and protective goggles before being allowed into the production areas. There wasn’t a great deal to see: a succession of large metal cylinders, an automated labelling system for plastic drums containing mint oil and a laboratory where a small team of chemists were testing samples of mint oil. Ian explained that the mint oil business hadn’t changed a great deal since the time of Albert May Todd. As he talked, the similarity with the vanilla business became clear. Like vanilla, mint is a natural plant product valued for its specific flavour properties. It is processed in a relatively simple manner and sold on in processed form to large scale food manufacturers as an ingredient in other products. It is also an industry that requires high standards of purity, because as with vanilla, industrial mint users require an ingredient which is chemically stable and consistent in flavour.
Ian was cautious about discussing what happened to the mint oil after it left the A.M. Todd factory. “You know, the food industry is very sensitive,” he said sheepishly. “We have to sign confidentiality agreements with the people we supply, and agree not to discuss what we do for them.”
As we returned to the wood panelled surroundings of the main building I began to understand something of the scale of success Albert Todd had enjoyed. In a small display cabinet there was a bottle of the original “Crystal White” peppermint oil produced by A.M. Todd at the 1876 exposition. A.M. Todd oils garnered medals at other trade fairs, including the Paris Exposition of 1900. More telling and remarkable than the ephemera of the mint oil bottles and labels from early product lines was the art upon the walls. Large oil paintings were dotted around the executive offices. Here was a copy of Velasquez’s’ Venus on one wall, copied from the National Gallery in London. “In those days it was common for American collectors to commission copies,” Ian explained almost apologetically. “If you couldn’t obtain the real thing, you could at least get a very good artist to reproduce the ones you liked.” Apart from copies of European masters, there were numerous originals by American artists, with pride of place going to a work by William Robertson Leigh from 1914. Entitled “The Great Spirit”, it depicts an Indian brave sitting on an escarpment and staring over a great expanse of mountain scenery. Ian seemed keen that I properly appreciated this particular work. “Out of all his collection, that was Todd’s absolute favourite,” he said. “He was very keen to promote artists who painted Americana.”
Aside from becoming a patron of the emerging school of ‘Western’ artists, Albert Todd made a further eight visits to Europe between 1907 and 1923, acquiring oil paintings, porcelain and sculptures. There were first editions of Tennyson, William Morris and Edgar Allan Poe. He also bought a fifteenth century edition of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, rare illustrated works of natural history by Audubon and original editions of ‘Captain Cook’s voyages’. When he died in 1931, aged eighty-one, much of his collection of twelve thousand books and hundreds of paintings passed to the University of Michigan and other public institutions. He once wrote; “I am having a good time buying what I don’t need and never can use. But the people can use them, get joy and inspiration from them …”
Todd was a capitalist and an entrepreneur with a social conscience. A supporter of prohibition, he also founded an organisation called the “Public Ownership League of America”, whose aims were to foster public control over railroads and utility companies. “He was definitely a reformer,” Ian explained. “And we always joke that he was the last Todd who was a Democrat!”
Albert Todd was elected to the United States Congress in 1896, the first Democrat elected in Michigan for almost fifty years. In one of the display cabinets I spotted a campaign lapel button with the slogan:
Pay your taxes, Worship God
Vote for the Honorable A.M. Todd.
In business, Albert Todd was not content to simply buy mint from other farmers, he realised that having his own plantations would enable him to make larger profits, and also to control more closely the quality of the plants he was harvesting. In the 1890’s he acquired large tracts of land not far from Kalamazoo, property that had been considered unsuitable for farming due to being waterlogged. In Michigan, these areas were known as the Mucklands. Todd invested in digging extensive drainage ditches in these wetlands and set up his own mint plantations, one of them named Mentha. Mentha developed into a settlement in its own right, acquiring it’s own shop, school, post office and railway station, and Ian showed me pictures of the impressive wooden buildings and immense steam tractors from the era.
Apart from being an astute businessman, Albert Todd’s fortune was significantly increased by developments in American consumerism that flourish to this day, namely chewing gum, and toothpaste. Kalamazoo is relatively close to Chicago, where a man named William Wrigley was in the soap-making business. To encourage shops and salesmen to take his product he would offer them extra incentives, such as free packets of baking powder to give away to their customers. The baking powder proved more successful than his soap, so Wrigley switched products. To promote the baking powder he offered free packets of chewing gum. Again, the samples proved more popular than the product they were meant to promote. In 1894, after experimenting with various flavours, Wrigley produced Spearmint—the world’s most popular chewing gum. Wrigley’s was not the only company that needed mint oil, and by the turn of the century Albert Todd was supplying firms such as American Chicle, Beechnut, Colgate and Proctor and Gamble. Within a few years, peppermint flavoured gum, and spearmint flavoured toothpaste were to become world-wide phenomena.
The dynasty that Albert Todd created from mint plants is still flourishing. In time Albert May’s son Albert John (‘A.J.’) took over the business, followed by his son A.J. ‘Junior’. A.J. ‘Junior was succeeded by Albert John Todd the Third, and then Henry W. Todd became the fifth generation to take up the reins as President of the company. It is his son, Henry ‘Junior’ who is now responsible for acquiring the vanilla stocks.
The world of international vanilla dealers has always been tightknit, or at least limited in its membership. In the 1960’s, the A.M. Todd company was still principally dealing in mint. At the time, a Philadelphia vanilla broker named Bernard Champon was working for the Zink and Triest company, a partnership formed by a former professional tennis player, ‘Bill’ Triest and his business associate, Jack Zink. They relied on Bernard Champon to buy their own vanilla stocks, since he spoke French, and they did not. When Zink and Triest began to think about retiring the Todd company received a tip off that the business might be for sale, and they made an offer. The mint industry was stable, but no longer expanding significantly and it was time to diversify. To trade successfully in vanilla would require the same sort of skills they had used to dominate the mint industry—and a healthy amount of investment, something the Todds could also provide.
Today the A.M. Todd group supplies ingredients for the food, beverage, flavour, fragrance, cosmetic, and dietary supplement industries. Their clients produce toothpaste and sports drinks, chewing gum and pharmaceuticals—all products that rely on achieving highly specific flavour characteristics as part of their distinctive identity. Henry Todd ‘Junior’, great great grandson of the ‘Peppermint King”, may be relatively young, but with antecedents like this, he can hardly be called an upstart.
Henry Todd took me back to Antalaha in a chartered plane. “I usually don’t have time to wait for the Air Mad schedule,” he explained as we climbed on board. “They don’t have daily flights to a lot of the places I need to visit, and I’d end up getting stuck somewhere.”
Away from Antananarivo, Henry was visibly more relaxed, and he had exchanged his tropical suit for a pair of jeans, sandals and a crisp white polo shirt. During the flight, which involved landings at Toamasina and at Sambava to top up with fuel, we took turns to sit beside the pilot. I discovered that Henry and I shared an interest in aeroplanes, a common affliction among people who fly alone frequently. I told him about a friend of mine with whom I played a game involving points according to which aircraft, which airlines and which airports one had visited. Behind his slightly cool professional exterior there was a man with a good sense of humour and a wide ranging awareness of current affairs. The fact that I had travelled to many of the places he knew well provided another bond.
At Antalaha Henry’s mood changed again. There was a delegation of people waiting to meet him at the airport when we landed. As our small Beechcraft taxied towards the terminal building, Henry warned me that for the next two days we would not be alone. “Apart from you,” he confided, “there are a lot of other people who’ve been asking to see our operation down here. I figured that it was better to let them all come at once, that way the farmers will only get to see one bunch of vazaha tramping en brousse through the vanilla plantations.”
“Why does that matter?” I asked.
“You know, the farmers see foreigners around, they get excited and the price starts going up straightaway. They don’t get a lot of white folks around here, so they always figure anyone they see is here to buy vanilla.”
Georges Randriamiharisoa, president of the vanilla exporter’s association and the Ramanandraibe curing house, was one of the delegation at the airport. There was also a collection of other people to whom I was introduced in bewilderingly quick succession. They included a young American man from Zink and Triest who was visiting Madagascar to obtain some auditing information on the vanilla trade, and two men from large flavour and fragrance manufacturing companies, one in France and one in the USA. A commercial attaché from the US embassy in Antananarivo had also made the journey, saying that he was newly arrived in Madagascar and he wanted to find out more about vanilla as a key export crop. There was another American, an elegant older woman who told me she had come to Madagascar to make a feasibility study of vanilla farming. She said she was working as a consultant for an aid agency that wanted to persuade coca growers in Colombia that vanilla might be a viable alternative to the drug trade. She, and all of the other people present, wanted to pick Henry Todd’s brains.
That night Henry and I stayed at a large colonial style house overlooking the waterfront at Antalaha. It had been acquired by Zink & Triest as a base for when Henry needed to stay in town. There were thick wooden shutters on the doors and windows and the furniture inside was made of heavy hardwood. It wasn’t comfortable, or particularly appealing to look at.
“There was an old French guy and his wife who lived here for thirty years,” Henry explained. “He decided to go back to France and he left all this furniture in the house when he went—I think he made some of it himself.”
The house was grand, but rather run down. Henry smoked a cigar and drank a glass of whiskey as we sat on the porticoed verandah overlooking the overgrown garden with its small empty fountain and a collection of untidy flower beds. He had a habit of peppering his conversation with French words, a language he had first studied at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Semi-permanent residency in Paris and his constant involvement with Madagascar meant that Henry was perfectly bilingual.
“Did you learn French because you knew you would end up in the family business?”
“No, not at all.” Henry said fiddling with his cigar, which seemed in danger of going out. “I had no intention of working with my dad. I wanted to be a banker and after college that’s what I did. Then I had a car accident and broke my leg very badly and ended up spending a lot of time in hospital. I guess after that I decided I wanted to do something other than sit in an office all day getting stressed about stuff that doesn’t really matter.”
“But isn’t vanilla trading stressful?”
“You know, Tim, it is. Goddamit!” Henry’s cigar had finally fizzled out. He went in search of some matches and returned a minute later, and I wondered if it was an excuse to change the subject. But he returned to my question. “Vanilla is so stressful I can’t even light a cigar these days,” he joked. “No, seriously, it can be stressful but no two days are ever the same. And I love places like this. Can I carry on doing it for another ten years? Maybe not. But when the travelling gets too much, I remind myself that if I end up back in the States in an office one day, I’ll miss all this.”
I felt I was getting to know Henry better, and I broached the subject of some of the rumours I had heard about Zink and Triest. “Are you ruthless?” I asked. Henry drew on his cigar for what seemed a long time. “I don’t accept that characterisation,” he finally replied, without showing any emotion. “We’re the biggest exporters and that gives us a certain amount of leverage in the market. People don’t like that. Would I do something that I considered unethical to beat my competitors? No. I think you have to maintain a reputation for straight dealing if you want to survive in this business. And we’ve survived through some very tough times. If we were ruthless we would have dropped some of our smaller customers when the price of vanilla went through the ceiling. We didn’t, and we’ve lost money on occasion honouring our contracts. Is that ruthless?”
“Where do you see the vanilla farmers in all this?” I asked, curious to know Henry’s perspective on their situation.
“Right now,” he said earnestly, “they’re doing great. But this market can’t sustain these prices indefinitely. When it crashes, it’s gonna’ crash big-time. Say what you like about state-control, but Malagasy farmers got something good out of it. They knew what price they were getting and they didn’t care how long it took to cure their beans. They turned curing into a genuine art-form.”
“Are they getting too much money for their beans now?”
“In the sense that the market is unbalanced, yes. I think an export price of around $60 a kilo would make everyone happy, and still give them a fair wage.”
I knew I had heard that figure before. In Mexico, Victor Vallejo had proposed a similar price as giving the farmers a fair deal. Surprisingly, Henry ‘Junior’ the world’s biggest vanilla buyer, and Victor, the farmer’s champion were talking the same language.
A few hundred yards along the seafront there was a rusty freighter tied up at the dilapidated jetty in front of a deserted customs house. “That’s the boat that takes our vanilla to Toamasina,” said Henry. “One of the reasons we bought this house here is that we can keep an eye on what’s going on at the dock. One of our rivals had an incident recently where he loaded three containers onto a boat and flew up to Toamasina to make sure it got onto the boat to Europe. When it arrived the containers were empty—the thieves had hijacked the boat and used acetylene torches to cut the hinges off the container doors!”
I tried to find out a little more about some of the people who had been at the airport that afternoon. Henry was frustratingly discreet whenever the conversation veered towards anyone with whom he did business. “Like you, they all want to know about vanilla,” Henry said cautiously. “The guys from the flavour houses want to see how the vines are doing—then they think they’ll have an idea about the size of next year’s crop. They’ll use that knowledge to try and second-guess me on price.”
The next day we all left in a convoy of four-by-four vehicles to drive to a plantation halfway between Antalaha and Sambava, a distance of about twenty-five miles. The road was dry and in poor condition, but it passed through some of the island’s prime vanilla land. Tiny villages, comprised entirely of simple huts covered in sun bleached palm thatch, flashed by and we left them behind in clouds of orange dust. Women and children sat beside the road sorting through carpets of red and brown chilli peppers and cloves. Young boys tended solitary cows on the grass verge outside the villages and there were naked ebony-skinned men with hard-muscled torsos bathing in muddy streams. A traffic jam formed at a narrow wooden bridge across a lagoon within sight of the sea. I decided to walk across it and met three little boys who wanted to show me a fish they had caught. It was no more than four inches long but they were proud of it and beamed at me in triumph as I took a photograph. On the lagoon there were men fishing from dugout canoes and the boys told me with wide eyes that upstream there were crocodiles.
This was fertile land. Jackfruits like grotesque scrotums hung from trees beside the road. Banana trees and cashews grew plentifully, and we passed women with baskets of fruit balanced upon their heads. They carried everything that way: one with a pile of freshly washed laundry, another some gnarled manioc roots and another, miles from any visible shop, had just a single can of Coca Cola perched on her tightly braided top-knot.
Occasionally we stopped. Henry would lead us into the trees to inspect vanilla vines growing close to the road. The vines were in flower, and whenever we stopped farmers emerged from their huts nearby to discuss how many pods might be produced in the next season. At one plantation a young boy came out to join the group wearing a tee shirt decorated with a portrait of Osama Bin Laden. The man from the embassy stared at it as though it might spring to life. “Why do you think he’s wearing that?” he asked me in a whisper.
“Who knows?” I tried to reassure him that he hadn’t stumbled on an Al Qaeda connection to vanilla. “I suspect he was given it—he may not even know who Bin Laden is. These people aren’t even Moslems.”
The talk turned to vanilla. The American from the flavouring company was particularly enthusiastic about what he saw. “Look, these vines are plump and healthy,” he said, fingering a green strand. “With all this bio-mass, I’m sure they will produce plenty of flowers.”
Henry, as well as the farmer and Georges Randriamiharisoa, who had come with us, thought otherwise. Yes, they said, the vines were healthy, but that didn’t bear any relation to how many flowers they might produce. That would depend on previous years’ production too. “We have had good crops for the last three years,” one farmer explained. “Even in the year of the bad cyclone the vines that survived grew many pods. But now they need a rest. We see this every few years, when the plants have given many pods they have to slow down for a season to get their strength back.”
As everyone made their way through the trees, stopping now and then to inspect vanilla vines, I asked the flavour manufacturer why he thought he knew more than the Malagasy farmers, and Henry. “Look, this is all a mind game,” he sneered. “The exporters want me to think next year’s crop will be small so that I’ll get scared of not getting the beans I need. But I’m not swallowing it.”
“Why would it suit Zink and Triest to tell you there were fewer beans available?”
“They want to scare me into thinking I might not get the beans I need for my own customers. I might get scared into signing a contract early in the season, so they can guarantee a good price,” he virtually snarled. “But I’ll always buy from several sources anyway, so no-one can get me over a barrel.”
For three hours we passed through tiny village after tiny village, the jeeps sliding across the ruts and potholes, rearing up and sliding down like beetles negotiating cracks in a pavement. Small children waved and ran alongside as we passed by Ambodimangamaro, Andrapengy, Manambato, Maromokotra, Antapolo and Ampahana. “I did this journey a few months ago when it was raining,” said Henry. “It took nine hours.”
When we reached the new plantation it was an idyllic spot, some miles from the nearest village. Neat rows of vanilla vines grew on natural tree supports on a gently sloping hill surrounded by thick forest. “We’ve got about seventy hectares here, but we’ve only planted half of it.” Henry explained. “We put in almost sixty thousand vines in 1999 and they’re just starting to fruit well.”
Out of earshot of the rest of the group I asked Henry what the advantage would be of owning a plantation. “Hopefully,” he said checking if any of the hangers-on were about to appear, “we can control the quality of the crop—and we can apply what we know about how to get the best from the vines on a more consistent basis.”
“Won’t people think you’re just trying to maximise profits by cutting out the small farmers?”
“You know what, Tim?” Henry had slipped into corporate mode again. “Whatever we do we’ll be the bad guys. When the price is high it’s our fault—and the food industry blames us. When the price is low, it’s the farmers who say we’re ripping them off. Right now Madagascar is at a really dangerous period in its vanilla history. Plenty of other countries are starting to sell good vanilla. But with prices so high we are really struggling to persuade our customers not to switch to artificial flavours. What Madagascar has is quantity, and quality. But now that the government isn’t guaranteeing the farmers a price they have no security. When the price of vanilla crashes—and believe me it will crash—we want to make sure we can still obtain a reliable supply.”
The issue of creating modern plantations worries some environmentalists. Traditional vanilla plantations use existing forest species as tutors on which to train the vines. If you create a more efficient plantation it may mean clearing areas of natural forest, and planting rows of tutor-trees which may not be indigenous. Plantations which have been cleared will support almost twice as many tutor trees. Critics of Zink and Triest told me that they feared that the company wanted to turn vanilla production into some kind of global agri-business, and that they planned to set up their own plantations to create a monopoly on vanilla production. I repeated the theory to Henry, but he just smiled.
“Yeah, I’ve heard those stories. But what the people who repeat them don’t seem to understand is that monopolies are a fairy tale. They only exist under dictatorships where they can be enforced. Anyone who’s ever tried to farm vanilla on a large scale knows what a headache it is. The security you need to protect thousands of acres of plantation is a nightmare, and actually makes it uneconomic. And anyway—even if we dominated the market—we are still going to have to obey the laws of supply and demand. Maybe we could slow a price crash down a little bit because of the volumes we trade in—but when the market falls, it falls.”
Every time Henry said anything, someone wrote it down. The woman from the aid agency also carried a video camera with which she filmed much of what Henry said and did. I asked if I might have a copy of the tape for my own use. “I couldn’t possibly do that,” she snapped aggressively. “My clients have paid for this information and everything I do for them is highly confidential.”
She was forever asking about the conditions under which the farmers lived and how much they would expect to earn from vanilla. The men from the flavour manufacturers were concerned about the same issues, but seemed particularly keen to hear how Henry planned to stop the farmers demanding more money for their crop. Meanwhile, the man from the US embassy was interested in all aspects of vanilla production, and clearly had no background in it at all. He had a very small notebook and he stuck close to Henry’s side, occasionally asking me to confirm something someone said in French. His command of the language was weak, and the flavour manufacturer didn’t speak French at all, forcing Henry to spend his day translating everything that any of the farmers said. He also had to translate questions from English into French, and by the end of the morning he was losing his voice.
After a tour of the vanilla plants we were taken to the newly finished plantation manager’s house. It sat on a rise with a clear view over the surrounding land and its serried rows of vines. A team of women scurried to and from the kitchen block to serve us lunch on the shady verandah. An enormous platter of lobsters appeared, enough of the scaly beasts for us all to have three or four apiece. There was chilled wine and fresh Malagasy coffee to accompany the cheese-board served as dessert. Everything on the table, except the rice which accompanied the lobsters, had been transported up the bumpy road to the plantation from Antalaha ahead of our arrival.
At the foot of the hill I could just make out a row of thatched huts nestling in a hollow on the edge of the cleared land. Henry had told me that the plantation had its own worker’s village, somewhere for the women who fertilised the flowers to stay during the pollinating season.
I left the table to explore. Up close the houses were small and square with pitched thatched roofs. Net curtains twitched in the breeze at the open windows. Two little girls, perhaps four and five years old, sat on the wooden steps leading up to the porch of one of the houses. They held hands and shrieked in fear as I approached and a woman appeared at the doorway to see what had happened. Her name was Marta, and she beckoned me up the step with a smile. The porch led into a single living and sleeping area, with just a single wooden chair to sit upon and a narrow bed in one corner of the room. I wondered if the family all had to sleep in it together, and Marta laughed, saying that as her husband wasn’t employed here on the plantation it didn’t matter.
“Do you earn good money with vanilla?” I asked.
“Very good,” she nodded vigorously. “I will stay here three months and the plantation will give me rice. They will pay 10,000 Malagasy francs (£1) a day, twice as much as any other crop.”
Marta showed me her small kitchen area, with a back doorway leading out to an outside sink and a clothes line at the rear of the house. There was no electricity this far from Antalaha, and the back yard had a stone hearth with a large black cooking pot sitting on a wire frame above it. Some children’s clothing, that I assumed belonged to the little girls, hung out to dry. Two tiny pairs of shorts, two tee-shirts and a towel swung on the line. All of them were extremely threadbare, scraps of cloth barely held together by their seams. I had wanted to see how the plantation workers lived, but the tiny clothes reminded me of my own young children and made me extremely ill at ease. I felt ashamed to be inspecting the worker’s poverty.
I climbed back up the hill and found that the rest of the group were waiting to leave. The lady from the aid project seemed to be swaying slightly, perhaps as a result of the wine. She asked where I had been.
“I went to see the worker’s village.”
“Oh, what a good idea. I should have thought of that,” she said. “How was it?”
“Fine.” I answered.
We made the return trip to Antalaha at speed, our drivers anxious to reach the town before night fell. I asked my driver if it was unsafe to travel in the dark. “Only because of the holes in the road,” he said. “But in the curing season it is very dangerous. Sometimes robbers will throw sticks of dynamite at a truck if they think it has vanilla on board.”
The pace of life by the road had slowed. In the twilight at Manambato a girl sat swinging a cloth to fan the flames in a metal brazier for the evening meal. A cow arched its back to piss copiously outside its owner’s hut. The women with their mats of cloves and peppers had gone, as had the smiling, waving children. On the bridge where I had seen the three boys with their tiddler of a fish the sky was a scarlet cloth above the leaden lagoon.
Two days later Henry Todd and I took a plane north to the town of Vohémar. The strain of the group tour had taken its toll and Henry was exhausted. Now, the accountant, the embassy man, the flavourists and the woman from the aid project had gone their separate ways and Georges too was back at work at Ramanandraibe’s warehouse in Antalaha. We stopped en-route for fuel, this time at Sambava, halfway to our destination. Once again there were no commercial flights due that day and we had the airport to ourselves. As we waited to climb back into the Beechcraft another small aeroplane landed and taxied to a spot on the tarmac a few yards from where we stood. It was a jet, a more expensive model than our own, and instead of one pilot it had two: neatly attired in smart uniforms. They unfolded the steps and stood smartly on the tarmac as an Indian looking man in a blazer and tie emerged from the cabin. Two other men followed him down the steps, and I recognised the same representatives from the two flavour companies who had been with us in Antalaha.
“Who are they with?” I asked Henry.
“He’s one of our competitors” he replied. “Someone we used to work with, but we fell out when we found out that he was involved in some stuff we didn’t like.”
A chauffeured car pulled up close to the executive jet, and the three men climbed in without acknowledging our presence. “Did you know the guys from the flavour companies were going to see him?”
Henry shook his head. “It’s not something we would discuss. But I could have guessed—none of our customers want to rely on a single source for their vanilla. He’s a major player, and a lot of people suspect him of speculating in the vanilla market: driving up the price when it suits him for a short term profit.”
It was difficult to get Henry to say any more, but when I returned to Antananarivo I made my own enquiries. It emerged that the businessman had previously been very close to the Ratsiraka regime, but had only recently started dealing in vanilla on a large scale. The rumour mill said Z&T had cut their ties with him because they found his buying techniques indisciplined, and he was costing the company money.
In the succeeding days I began to understand something of the complexity of dealing in vanilla. Henry Todd’s job was to gather as much information as possible about the vanilla market. On each visit to Madagascar he needed to physically inspect the vanilla vines on as many plantations as possible, and speak to as many farmers, collectors and curers as he could. He would then compare this information with what he was told by his suppliers, not just the large exporting companies like Ramanandraibe in Antalaha, but also the much smaller firms in the provincial towns. Henry also had to cast a careful eye over the business practices of the firms he was buying from. At the same time he needed to find out what his rivals were offering to pay for cured vanilla, and balance his own offers of a contract against what he estimated his customers in the USA and Europe would be prepared to pay.
Henry took me to a succession of meetings were in small musty offices behind little wooden shops. Cheaply produced calendars sponsored by builder’s merchants or shipping companies were pinned to cracked plaster walls, and ancient wooden desks were piled high with hundreds of pieces of paper. In Vohémar there was Gerard Dubosc, a Merina with close-cropped hair and dancing brown eyes. He fiddled with a calculator while he talked, continually punching in figures while he answered Henry’s questions. Whenever Henry queried anything about the sums being discussed, Gerard rolled his eyes heavenwards and spread his hands. “Ah!” he would say; “les spéculateurs!”
Another day, we took tea with Roger Athoy on the balcony of his house. He was an elderly Chinese man wearing a singlet stretched over a rotund belly and baggy cotton shorts that seemed in danger of falling down about his ankles. His hair was slicked straight back from his forehead and he dabbed at his eyes and forehead with a handkerchief while we talked, complaining that he was suffering a bout of malaria. There was a stuffed hawksbill turtle nailed to the wall above his chair.
As in Tahiti, the vanilla curers and exporters seemed often to be of Indian or Chinese origin, men with cash to spend on acquiring stocks from the native growers. “It’s often the case,” Henry agreed. “Even in Uganda. These people have a long history in trade.”
On a rolling green plain outside Vohémar we met a Frenchman named Christophe. He was tall and lean with tightly curled hair, a trim moustache and a selection of heavy gold chains around his neck. Christophe wanted Henry to see his new vanilla plantation, a venture he said represented an investment of several million dollars. It wasn’t yet producing vanilla in commercial quantities but he felt sure that next year he would have something special to sell. So far, they had planted almost ninety acres of vanilla, and Christophe said he hoped he would eventually produce eighty tonnes of crop per annum.
Everyone in Vohémar seemed to know Christophe. He sped around the tiny town on an off-road motorbike, and people told me I should be careful because they believed he had once been a mercenary. They whispered that his nickname was ‘Capitaine Paff!’—a French term for Pow!, the noise made by a gun.
One of Christophe’s pieces of jewellery was an eighteen-carat gold pendant in the shape of a scuba diver, and he told me that he had once made a lot of money diving for red coral in the Mediterranean. He said he had been given a ‘special permit’ to dive off North Africa. Apart from the vanilla plantation, Christophe also had a business growing marine algae for cattle feed. “It has plenty of iodine; very good for cows,” he said. He also owns a crocodile farm.
On our last day in Vohémar Henry arranged for us to meet a friend of his called Serge Rajaobelina. Serge runs a charity named Fanamby, working to preserve a small evergreen forest in an area known as LokyManambato. Serge told me that Henry had been making donations to the project but until now, he had never had a chance to take him there.
“How far is it?” I asked as we climbed into yet another jeep.
“Just a couple of hours,” Serge replied cheerfully. However, it was already two o’clock in the afternoon, and although he said we would be back well before dark, I had a sense of foreboding about how long the journey might take. According to the road signs, Daraina, the town closest to our destination, was only twenty miles away. “We are working there with a local community,” Serge explained as we jiggled and lurched against each other while the driver negotiated the uneven road. “We want to encourage them to preserve a patch of forest that is home to an extremely rare group of lemurs. It’s a population that has only recently proven to be a separate species, and one of the most endangered primates in the world.”
At one bad patch in the road we met an enormous lorry with a broken axle blocking the traffic in both directions as a group of men, passengers and drivers tried to repair it with rope and pieces of metal. The lorry had slewed across the road leaving room only for pedestrians to pass. I asked one of the men how long it would take to fix. “Two days,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe three.” The women and children travelling in the truck were already setting up a makeshift camp in the long grass nearby, unable to do anything except wait for the vehicle to be repaired. The children were sent to find firewood for cooking while their mothers began assembling pots to boil water. Meanwhile, behind the accident, a queue of eight or nine other lorries all filled with people and baggage sat patiently in the mud. Serge’s driver enlisted the men from one of the lorries to cut a path through the bush nearby for our jeep to pass. They piled up brushwood and sticks under the wheels of our vehicle to get it over the most uneven ground and after half an hour we were able to drive on.
The landscape was a monumental swathe of plains and hills, lush vegetation and ochre earth. Five hours later, with the light fading rapidly, we jolted down a narrow track to a tiny settlement, perched on the banks of a narrow, river bed. About forty people live in the collection of huts, which can hardly be called a village, and many of them gathered shyly around Serge as he explained that we, the vazaha, were here to see how the Fanamby project worked. He told me that his main efforts were concentrated on making sure the villagers didn’t cut any trees down and reduce the available habitat for the lemurs.
The dry season had reduced the river to a trickle, and the riverbed was full of logs and dead tree trunks. The villagers had taken advantage of the low volume of water to divert its flow into a succession of crude channels and sink holes. Half-naked men, women and children sprawled in the mud. Their faces, hair, clothes and skin were all dyed the same milk-shake brown, slick with water and gloop as they pushed handfuls of slimey mud through crude round sieves. They were panning for gold, tiny flecks of unrefined ore which they would sell to businessmen, many of them from the Far East, who make the long road journey here to the Daraina Forest. In the tall gum trees overhanging the riverbed there were lemurs with bright round eyes watching the activity below.
Serge explained that the Daraina lemurs are a small population of golden-crowned sifakas—one of five families that make up the genus. Like most of Madagascar’s fauna, the lemurs and their kin are endemic species, remnants of ancient times when the great island was attached to the giant continent of Gondwanaland. Ancient or not, the villagers protect the sifakas, believing them to be sacred spirits whose existence must be guaranteed if the gold is to be found in the river. The people who share the forest have pronounced the lemurs fady, or taboo.
“God gave us this river,” one of the men explained to me. “And the lemurs have always lived here with us. We are so lucky to have this place, and we must keep others away so that they do not cut down the forest.”
“Do you have any gold?” I asked the man.
He nodded and reached under his shirt for a small leather pouch tied around his neck. Gently, he untied the neck and tipped the contents of the pouch into his hand. Several nuggets, the largest no bigger than a dental filling tumbled into his palm. It was dull, dirty ore, but it represented a serious amount of money to the village.
Not far from where we stood, Henry had scrambled through the river bed onto the far bank. He was standing staring up into the branches of a slender tree with two boys from the village. One of them gave Henry a banana and then made a clucking noise with his tongue, as if he were calling a horse. Within seconds, a rustle and a swaying branch announced the arrival of a mother lemur with a tiny baby clinging to her back. No more than eighteen inches in height, she had thick white fur, with a delicate pale russet patch between her ears as if she had dipped her head into a tub of cinnamon.
The lemur sat stock still at the juncture of branch and trunk, assessing the two creatures standing below her with a fixed stare. Then, cautiously, she turned away so that she could shimmy backwards down the tree trunk until she was just within arm’s length of Henry. The boy passed him the banana and Henry held it out. The lemur grasped the fruit with delicate black fingers, holding it in her teeth and chattering as she scampered upwards to a high branch to feast in peace. Henry stood and grinned up at the lemur, his face flushed with pleasure.
At Daraina, Serge had arranged for his staff to provide some food for us before we hit the road. There was grilled chicken, barbecued zebu meat and a selection of cheese and bread. By the time we returned to Vohémar it was past eleven. Christophe and some other vanilla dealers were waiting at the guesthouse, expecting Henry to join them for dinner. We were all exhausted but the owner of the guesthouse had fresh lobster and tuna ready to place on the grill. “Do we really have to eat dinner again,” I asked. “You don’t,” Henry muttered. “But I do. It’s business.”
He was right, his job really wasn’t like being a banker at all.