The air in this entire region is perfumed with the sweet “mangitra� sent of vanilla beans lying out to dry in the sun on countless gunny sacks, woven mats, and (for those who have money enough to purchase them) heavy blankets. At this stage in the drying process, we pass men and women sitting on raffia mats in the shade, sorting through piles of vanilla done drying for the day, selecting out those beans that are ready to be removed and bundled into fat black bunches, tied together with thin “tady� and set apart from the rest.

When this is done, the remaining unready beans–still swollen, partially green and shining in the strong sun of mid-day—are bundled up into neatly rolled blankets and gunnies and left to sit in this bed of insulation a while longer. More than a few hours of direct sunlight reduces the quality of the vanilla beans as they are drying, as does scalding them for more than 1-2 minutes when the green “mantaâ€? pods are prepared for drying.

The Malagasy have the preparation process down to a science. On a walk to the beach near Imorona, I met and became friends with a vanilla buyer in town from Antalaha. He took me to “mandalo� a villager about to “cook� raw beans in preparation for drying. In front of his ravinala hut (on stilts—likely a replacement of a previous hut destroyed in the big cyclone of 2003) the man was hacking bamboo and driftwood into kindling for a giant fire, on top of which sat a rusty oil drum filled with scalding hot black water. After being offered a coconut from which to drink—very nice of him to sacrifice one to the “vazaha� stranger who had just wandered into his yard without purpose—he pointed out a giant woven basket about the depth and diameter of the oil drum. It was promptly filled with long, fat green seed pods by a few neighbor helpers. A bamboo pole was thrust through the handles of the giant sieve-like basket and the bass was dunked into the scalding water, stirred some with a strip of raffia bark bent into a large triangular prodder, and one bean quickly removed and held up to the man’s forearm skin for a temperature test. The man held the bean up to my arm next, to let me feel what just the right water temperature and length of scalding produced. The basket was promptly hoisted out of the water by the bamboo pole and immediately transferred to a large wooden box, inside which were crouching three women on layers of blankets, their hands holding open a pocket of blanket where the scalded beans were deposited and immediately covered. This process was repeated with determination and rapidity. The watere must be just the right temperature. A few degrees off will adversely affect the quality of the finished dry beans.

I was told that the beans would sit in the insulated, padlocked boxes overnight. In order to get those black flecks we Americans love so much in our vanilla ice cream, Malagasy farmers plant vanilla orchid vines below Glyricidia tutor trees, wrap the vines multiple times around their tutors, bringing them back to the ground to root each additional stand, then wait 2 years for the orchids to produce flowers. Sometimes transplants will produce a low yield earlier.

Each flower must be hand-pollinated the day it opens. Vines flower over the course of a 2-month or so window, meaning vanilla fields must be visited daily at this season—even Sundays, even in religious communities.

Once the pollinated flower produces its green finger-like fruits, the Malagasy government announces a date to open the vanilla season. Before this date, it is not permitted to pick and start preparing seed pods. After the green pods are scalded, the drying process takes at least a month, depending on how much—and at what time of day—it rains. Each dry bean is systematically run through the thumb and forefinger by hand and separated into quality piles: redder beans in one group, nice deep black ones in another, and split pods in yet another, lower-price fetching pile. Each pile is sorted into tied bundles by bean length. These bundles are sold to middlemen (and women) buyers, who transport their valuable cargo by boat or “specialeâ€? commissioned 4×4s to Antalaha where most larger scale buyers then arrange to commercially distribute vanilla shipments to buyers in France and elsewhere. Some of these top-level buyers are Malagasy; many are “Chinoisâ€? (I gather that means from various Asian countries.)

Farmers who sell their vanilla beans green to buyers who the prepare them to sell to middlemen transporters who then sell them to exporters who then sell to foreign distributors, do so because they do not have the means or connections to dry and market their vanilla themselves. This year, the established price Malagasy farmers earned per kilo of green vanilla was 4,000 AR (about $2 per kilo). The vanilla bean yield for a healthy, well-trained orchid “vine� is between 4 and 5 kilos in this region, meaning each plant yielded between 16,000 and 20,000 AR ($8-$10) for farmers who sold their pods green. The highest quality black, dried vanilla beans fetch about 75,000 FMG or 15,000 AR per kilo this year.

Vanilla farmers in this region are still recovering from the shock of how low the per-kilo price of green and dry vanilla has been this year and last. In 2003-4, vanilla prices skyrocketed to an artificial high, the reason for which I am unaware of. Just a few years ago, the price farmers received per kilo of green vanilla was between 200-300,000 FMG or 40,000-60,000 AR ($200 per kilo). That, for Malagasy farmers and buyers, was an unfathomably high sym and people had more money than they knew what to do with. (This is an exclusively cash economy where the largest bill is 10,000 AR ($5) and banks only exist in the country’s largest towns.