The region known as Sava in Madagascar – roughly the same size as Wales – is responsible for around 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla crop. While vanilla was first cultivated by the Maya in the forests of Mexico, it is in this region, in the northeast of Madagascar, that it found a home for modern times, after French colonists brought over the vanilla orchid in the 1880s.
Chemical synthesis of the single vanillin chemical may have driven the “vanilla” to become the world’s most popular fragrance, found in everything from makeup to bug repellants, and now a term synonymous with blandness and mediocrity. But connoisseurs maintain that no laboratory product can match the subtle, creamy-rich flavour of the natural aroma, which contains nearly 200 chemical molecules.
Madgascar’s climate and soil proved ideal for vanilla, giving pods a higher concentration of natural vanillin than those grown in other markets. A large pool of smallholder farmers is also readily available to grow this labour-intensive plant, which is essentially a delicate vine that grows between the trees of the rainforest. Individual pods must all be picked by hand, before being blanched in hot water, massaged, and left to cure in the sun over a three-month period.
Take a two-hour internal flight northeast from Antaniravo, Madagascar’s bustling capital city, and you will find yourself in the lush green rainforests of Sava. Unlike the semi-arid southern part of the island or the naked mountains of the centre, Sava – which takes its name from the towns of Sambava, Andapa, Vohémar and Antalaha across the region – is Madagascar as seen on TV: A world-beating biological hotspot holding 70 per cent of the country’s primary forest, and home to thousands of plants and animals.
“Arriving in villages in Sava, you drive up an unpaved road to these houses made of wood and straw, and you wonder where exactly the vanilla is,” explains Ernest Randriarimalala, a Malagasy advisor working with the NGO WaterAid who recently visited the region. “It’s really hidden away: there’s a little bit in the forest here, a little bit there, and it can take many hours to walk between the patches.”
With farmers waking up in the small hours to work 12-hour shifts, vanilla farming has never been easy. But the challenges faced by vanilla farmers are becoming ever more profound with the advent of climate change: a crisis that experts warn represents a potentially existential threat to Madagascar vanilla. The UN has labelled it the fourth-most climate vulnerable country in the world, and farmers in Sava are already warning of the threat to vanilla from changing rain patterns and the ever growing risk of tropical cyclones.
According to Dasy Ibrahim, a Malagasay project manager at the NGO Care, high temperatures combined with increasingly volatile rain patterns are making vanilla vulnerable to diseases, particularly the fungal-borne disease fusarium wilt. At the same time, the vanilla flowering period has shifted in recent years, running from September to January, when it used to begin in November. “This flowering phenomenon is attributable to stress caused by high temperatures and persistent, strong trade winds,” Ibrahim explains.
A combination of this earlier flowering and delays in the rainy season means that a large number of pods are ripening earlier. But only those pods that have matured for a full nine months after pollination are judged to meet the required standard. That means that a large chunk of the crop becomes void, says Ibrahim.
Edlyne Fenozara, a vanilla farmer in the village of Tsaratanana, has seen these impacts first-hand. “Before we had regular rain and our vanilla plants grew properly. Now, it is getting warmer with less rain,” she says. “Because of the lack of rain, we always have some vanilla dying as the rain comes later than it used to.”
Ferozara has also experienced the devastation that tropical cyclones can cause to both vanilla plants and the villages in which farmers and their families live. “The wind can rip off all the vanilla plants from the ground and throw them 20 meters away,” says Fenozara. “Trees and falling branches are also breaking vanilla plants and the overly wet soil causes root rot.”
Between 2000 and 2023, 47 tropical storms and cyclones hit Madagascar, with Sava one of the regions worst hit. Some 740,000 people were left homeless over that period – and in just the last few months, Cyclone Dikeledi and Tropical Storm Jude have displaced 30,000 more.
“Every year from January to March is the cyclone season and I personally pray to God so no cyclones with strong winds come across our area and destroy my plantation,” says Dricia, another vanilla farmer, who works in a village called Andrahanjo.
Gael Lescornec, executive director at industry advocacy group the Sustainable Vanilla Institute, says that another big problem related to climate shocks is the volatile nature of vanilla prices when the shocks hit. “Volatility makes it hard to give confidence to the market and you can invest in opportunities around vanilla and vanilla farmers,” she says.
After Cyclone Enawo, a category 4 storm, displaced 500,000 people as it made landfall on the island in 2017, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to more than $400,000 per tonne. Vanilla became so valuable that farmers at the time reported widespread theft and gang violence.
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