Vanilla: travels in search of the luscious substance
Tim Ecott Michael Joseph, 278pp, £16.99
ISBN 0718145895
For most of us, vanilla is an innocent-seeming pleasure. It is the flavour of sponge cake and custard, and the most basic ice cream. But, like many of the things to which we so casually treat ourselves each day - coffee, sugar, chocolate - vanilla has a violent history. To put those black flecks into your expensive bowl of Ben & Jerry's, many will have sold their labour for just a few dollars a day, and others will have risked murder.
The most sought-after vanilla comes from Madagascar. It will cost you the best part of a tenner (even in Tesco!) to buy a bottle of Madagascan "Bourbon" vanilla essence. But little of this value makes its way back to the farmers who grew the pods that went into the precious elixir. Vanilla production is an everyday tale of economic exploitation. Indeed, the recent history of the vanilla trade is like a lesson in post-Marxist economics: first, the inequities of the cartel system; then, the inequities of the free market.
Until a few years ago, the whole Madagascan vanilla market was centrally controlled, by the government and by a "marketing board". Back in the 1960s, Madagascar set up a Bourbon vanilla cartel with Reunion, setting high prices and restricting supply. For a while, this seemed to work. In 1974, the Bourbon vanilla cartel's share of the world market exceeded 80 per cent. But then cheap vanilla from Indonesia undermined Madagascar's dominance.
The marketing board's strategies became increasingly desperate. To keep the price artificially high, it would stockpile whole years' harvests and destroy thousands of precious brown pods. Economists were concerned that the farmers were not getting the benefit of these high prices. Ordinary people were being exploited by the evil cartel. Things would be better in a free market, they said. Prices would come down, but farmers would get proportionally more money.
Which just goes to show that economists never know. Because, when the trade in Madagascan vanilla did become "free", the prices, far from stabilising, shot up to an alarming level. The world, it seems, really does put a premium on Madagascan vanilla. In 1999, the retail value of cured vanilla was $25-$40 per kilo. By 2001, this had reached $150. Now, after bad harvests in 2002, it is closer to $500. But have the farmers reaped the value of these prices? Have they heck. The people who really make money out of vanilla remain the same as always - the curers and the traders.
Vanilla is a peculiarly labour-intensive business. You need one set of people to grow the green pods on orchid-like plants, another lot to pick them, and yet another set to cure these pods in the hot sun until they are brown yet moist. Another problem is that vanilla is easy to steal. Unless there is tight security, the pods will get stolen off the plants before they are even ripe. Vanilla is now such a valuable commodity - needed for everything from Chanel No 5 to Gordon Ramsay's sea bass - that insurers are refusing to cover vanilla warehouses. Vanilla murders are common and vanilla smuggling is commoner.
Much of this story is told in Tim Ecott's rather laddish travelogue around Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti (although not Indonesia, a less exotic location, but just as crucial to the vanilla trade). Ecott meets all kinds of people involved in vanilla, from the shady buyers to the underpaid Malagasies who get $3 a day for handling this valuable commodity, and count themselves lucky (you get half as much if you work with rice). For my taste, Ecott gives us too many irrelevant descriptions ("Fit and slim, his tropical lightweight suit hangs immaculately from his broad shoulders"). But at its best, the book is riveting. There is one brilliant scene where it transpires that the female Madagascan vanilla workers - who do not cook with it themselves - have no idea why foreigners would spend so much on these little beans. Surely, it must be used for dynamite? Or tyres for a car? No one would pay so much for food!
Bee Wilson's The Hive is published by John Murray in September
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
