Meet those getting rich off vanilla in Madagascar | Foreign Correspondent

there's a much-loved faces of Madagascar father mother and son amazing they're jungle homes now under pressure as we crave a flavor vanilla on this Indian Ocean island its vanilla bean boom time and everyone wants the air slice vanilla the best not income better than vanilla in Madagascar and I think in the world there's a killing to be made 50 fold increase in price the you can understand there is vanilla and vanilla tonight we take a wild journey through Madagascar to discover there's nothing bland about vanilla in the vanilla capital of the world it's party time in this bar in the north Madagascar town of Sam bhava tonight's draw card is a young local singer frisco allah Poirot Frisco's music celebrates the business that's transforming one of the poorest places on earth the white hot in vanilla traders in the crowd for some of the people riding the vanilla boom like sought-after local tour guide yuck no and tables full of vanilla hustlers they're middlemen who trade the crop in the streets of Sam bother if they call themselves us cover this songs about them in a nation where jobs are scarce and work often back-breaking these are good times for the vanilla hustlers of Madagascar strong demand and short supply has sent prices through the roof just a few years ago one kilogram of processed vanilla was worth $80 now it's $800 that's more expensive than silver a savvy hustler can make a fortune just by taking a cut of each deal a vanilla slice no the tour guide is showing me around vanilla city there's so much at stake here our attention makes some of the traders nervous so we wanted to talk to some Milman people who buy the vanilla and sell it to others further along the chain but we've been told that we can't talk to these deals on the street we have to talk to a spokesman for the Association so we're just trying to do that now permission granted can you show us the vanilla that he's trading it's there is no one of the best quality right but the lowest quality of the vanilla is called Kate pretty good well that's better yeah it's not yet not yet dry enough right it's still so yeah also need to do another process everyone wants a piece of the action even the hottest singer in town for Crisco it's pretty much the only way to make his music dreams possible they're full of amazing enough Akira disease Mizuki there aren't many ways to make a decent living in Madagascar people do anything they can to get by they wash old jars and bottles to sell they pull huge loads by hand and whole families sleep on the street but the vanilla boom means that finally some serious cash is being earned and spent it's crazy busy always like this yeah yeah exactly because the vanilla people have lots of money and they buy more to talk and they buy more taxi booze and then they were working on it it's amazing like it feels like market diver this is everyday yeah it's it's always it's always like a market one thing you noticed walking out vanilla street is that there's a lot of flash motorbikes look pretty new I think that's what people are spending their middleman money on it seems to me that the street hustlers they are not saving their money they are spending it now mm-hmm yeah yeah they're like spending it now because they don't really know how to save money and then how to keep it so if they got money so they directly want to buy whatever they want the next rung on the vanilla ladder means not having to hustle on the streets your customers come to you and that's how it works for the owner of this vanilla mansion this is the home of big-time middleman Tony he grew up on this street now he towers above it so Tony from here can you can you see how some Bubba has changed because of vanilla 70% all right yes it's a that it's a very very big changement in the level of the tone I mean when the vanilla was the low price the the building there was not yet there so all of the building like high that we saw right now is because of vanilla right and they're all people like you like middlemen traders who are making the money listen it's made from glass and let's see it depends on your behavior it depends on your skill how to work and how to manage your money with an appetite for life and for business tony's street hustling days are over and these days it's the help who take care of his prized possessions we're heading into the hills outside Sam bother to get to the source of all this vanilla desperately poor rough-hewn huts with no mains electricity running water or sewage but incredibly beautiful here in Madagascar's hinterland the beam is everywhere even at roadside cafes hustlers are looking to offload their latest trade it's it's feels oily yo has invited us to his village to meet some vanilla farmers he hasn't been home for a while and he's very pleased to see his two-year-old daughter so she is my wife in this river village is slow yup those relatives make money selling light cheese to bus passengers for a few cents of time today is a bigger day than most there's a wedding in a neighboring village yo knows a striver his hustled vanilla and driven taxis in Sam bhava and his command of French and English means he's in demand to lead tourists into the nearby National Park Mirage AJ it allowed him to build his own home but it's hard to be away from his family because my work is dependent a traveling yeah I have to go and then yeah I go tomorrow daddy for example but when I go tomorrow JG which is for tourists maximum four or five days no no it's being pulled back to the village by family and by vanilla I'm I say I'm jealous you know because everyone here planting vanilla and they know in southern region is penalized that the crazy money you know and then why not I'm from the village so I have to move back here you have land you can't find vanilla yes I have Linda I mean it's not my my own land but my parents give it to me yeah yeah because right now I could boil India but I have it now yeah what's gonna have look at you failed yes of course weekend I will show it to you next growing vanilla is a blend of hard draft in the lightest of touches this is vanilla wine we cut it this and then we'll make it our own which is to make easy like a transport system so you can replant a vine yes once it's cut vanilla orchid to transform into a bean it must be pollinated by hand each flower is ready for pollination for just a few hours each year and for this orchid today is the day so how to do it as well so this is orange fall we use this because the orange form is more soft so it doesn't scratch either part of the flower so the way to do it the flower of the vanilla there is a covered this is called Bailey so we push the belly down so now we can see the real flower right but for the vanilla flower there is a male here up here and the female is down here yeah but there is the tongue which is evolved the contact from the male to the female that's why it has to be a hand pollinating hand being the vanilla orchid originally comes from Mexico where it's pollinated by a native bee the green one is the vanilla pod here the farmers technique was invented by a 12 year old slave boy Edmund obvious in the 1840s and is still being used today the goal is the male will have a contact with a female but right now he cannot because it's avoided by the tongue so what I do is I push this tongue up and then I press softly the male to the female now it's done with this flower you only have one day to do it right only one hand one day only today only one day and only to the end that the best way to pollinate is is morning before twelve o clock after twelve o clock the flowers start to be sad which is not really good yeah not as sad as the farmer it doesn't pollinate it in time it'll take four years for yoke nose vanilla vines to start producing pods when they're ready you'll want to skip the hustlers and sell directly to a place like this it smells amazing it smells like vanilla now you are in the warehouse second step and we are now murdering the vanilla yo unless you works alongside Daniel Gault Ron who owns this export business with his wife the third generation of her family to grow vanilla it's a big lucrative operation driven by the appetite for natural vanilla in everything from ice creams to perfume story of the vanilla from this last year is amazing because the price from the green vanilla increase from $1 to $50 so you can imagine a 50 fold increase in price yeah so what is this worst he's thinking the cost price is around 200 $150 $150 US dollars yes nice it looks smaller the first show you're on a bunch of vanilla I bought earlier from a street hustler now you can understand there is vanilla and vanilla it's absolutely not the same this vanilla is just from looks like green vanilla a green beans but it's not dry if you want to get good products this takes around four five six months paper in preparation this is only one week they just fetch in the water to get the brown Coral and then dry it for two days and understand and that's it this need around three months right there's a lot of vanilla in this warehouse which provides lots of employment to people in the area measuring counting and packing even though it might look like they've had a bumper crop the harvest was poor this year climate is changing and we have difficulties to have a lot of vanilla like before demand for good vanilla keeps growing which is driving the prices up for everyone from exporter to the consumer Daniel this is all good for business right the high prices a terrific for you sympathy investor new on fettunta a vacant house on the Columbia community Oakmont ii ii ii ii ii all mm quantity of it who to replace the wrong prefer to roll American citizen Simon could become only the stillness item supply Kimia come be able the harder than you even so times are good and they can see the benefits for local people live in teepees long semester day - olya the wedgie or the possible damage around you - chitters laughs he's always at my facility no the Pokemon team of people here I can win the salary of their whole life in one year most of older farmers like that in one year the boat for there's a lot of money at stake for this business their workers are under constant surveillance throughout the day when it's time to pack up there's a roll call and every worker is checked to make sure they haven't pocketed any beans with each vine holding up to a kilogram of vanilla pods crime can pay handsomely and theft is a big problem police stations are often few and far between so villagers organize their own protection with roadblocks like this for three months before harvest farmers will take turns to sleep with the crop but even so it might not be enough sometimes the consequences can be fatal over the last year or so farmers have killed vanilla thieves trying to steal their harvest have people stolen from these crops yes people put so much time and effort into it and so much of their own energy and money that when they catch a thief there must be big anger yeah very very very angry they it has to be like two ways maybe they were send it to the police or gender and then bring him to in jail directly otherwise the people the owner of the vanilla getting aggressive will affect me which mean they can do crazy thing today theft is such an issue farmers often pick their crop early to beat the thieves before the vanilla has matured it means a lot of the vanilla that hits the market isn't export quality another reason why prices of the best beans are soaring to try and ensure quality and supply some of the world's largest producers of flavours and fragrance getting involved workers from multinational manufacturers sim rise they're trying to convince farmers not to harvest too early we give them some phones to allow them to to organize themselves all the men in the villages to do some some round during the night so the farmers I don't need to stay all along the night in their place and it decreased the fifth actually we have good wizard like this year failure most of the quality will be good this year because most of the the farmers wait for the full maturity of a vanilla before other things this farmers crop has been robbed at four times is it worth it Rene all this trouble sleeping with your crops guarding it from thieves is it would not be easy to grow I don't know pineapples yeah well I'm risk for mumble yeah vision become easy and Pongal a travel whenever the reimu of avoided aesthetically woman on many hague felicity in this country where so many people live hand-to-mouth even the steepest hills are cultivated for rice bananas white cheese and increasingly for vanilla this is putting immense pressure on the remaining forest which in turn is threatening the survival of much of Madagascar's critically endangered wildlife parts of Madagascar but you have to make a real effort to go and see them which is why we're taking a two-day trek up there into the marriage edge Air National Park where hopefully we'll see one of the other things that Madagascar is most famous for apart from vanilla and that's the lemur about 90% of Madagascar's reptiles plants and mammals exist nowhere else on earth much of that biodiversity is at risk lemurs are among the most endangered primate group in the world largely due to habitat loss well that was really hard we came out 700 meters over five hours about 12 kilometers extremely beautiful here but after that I really hope we find some Leamas well the climbers paid off a family of lemurs came through our camp at five o'clock this morning when we were asleep and we sent a guide down to follow them down here about 500 meters away and there's a family of free lemurs in the tree just up there I can see two of them now father mother and son amazing it's made to climb worth it we're looking at silk Issa they're one of the rarest mammals in the world they are now believed to be fewer than 250 in the wild this is the only place on earth you'll see them they cling precariously to the last remaining patch of forest in the heart of vanilla country along the way we're also lucky enough to see bamboo lemurs and white headed lemurs internationally and locally a lot of work is being done to try and secure the best future for Madagascar's people and it's rare plants and animals but it's hard to make people care when life is so tough and vanilla prices are riding so high Sunday night in vanilla city and the weekly beach party is in full swing it's pouring rain but nobody hears bothered for the moment they've got money in their pockets but the vanilla price has soared and crashed before and it will happen again when supply inevitably catches up with demand a lot of the people riding the boom will be in trouble but that's tomorrow's problem infra - a guide yoke now with a field full of vanilla vines and dreams of a much bigger future life is good yeah because tour guide is not too bad but vanilla ice is the best no income better than vanilla in Madagascar and I think in the world

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 99,599

Keywords: ABC news australia, foreign correspondent madagascar, vanilla industry, price of vanilla, madagascar culture, madagascar economy, madagascan vanilla, madagascar environment, Sambava, madagascar lemur, madagascar deforestation, vanilla documentary, national geographic, nat geo, booming industries 2019, vanille sambava, vanilla perfume, vanilla fragrance, vanilla recipe, foreign correspondent vanilla, Meet those getting rich off vanilla in Madagascar | Foreign Correspondent

Id: OrAmGJv7kbw

Length: 27min 59sec (1679 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019