clipped the sacks to the scale outside, then logged the weight
of each farmer’s harvest in a ledger.
In the dirt yard outside the hut, several dozen men stood
in tight circles, watching the weigh-in. They were the buy-
ers, or collectors, as they’re called here. Most had arrived
that morning, using rafts to get their motorcycles across the
river we’d forded.
The regional markets follow an established protocol,
the men explained. After the weigh-ins, the farmers gather
together and come up with a per-kilo asking price, then write
that figure on the chalkboard. The collectors stare at the
number for a while, then huddle up. They rub out the farm-
ers’ price and scribble a counteroffer. This back-and-forth is
repeated until the figures match. When that happens, the
buyers divvy up the beans, collecting however many tons
each has agreed to buy. The process can take a day or a week.
If this one stretched into tomorrow, most of the farmers and
collectors planned to search for a friendly villager with a lit-
tle extra floor space where they might curl up and sleep.
The year before, at a market much like this, one collector
had gone rogue, forgoing the chalkboard system and negoti-
ating directly with a village chief behind closed doors. When
news of the man’s attempt to sidestep the protocol spread
to the other collectors, he was chased through the village,
apprehended, and jailed.
This particular sale featured no spectacular foot chases
orcitizen’sarrests.Butit hadplentyofunexpectedintrigue
anddeception.Thebusinessis cruel,humane,comic,tragic,
ingenious, and flat-out insane, often at the same time. As we
struggled to untangle the drama playing out, we began to
suspect that our original goal—to try to understand the vanilla
trade—should be secondary. It seemed more important to sim-
ply observe this whole business in a particular way: with a
sustained appreciation for how incredibly wild global trade,
at its most elemental level, actually is.
Vanilla, in its essence, is an adventure story.V
anillaorchidsarenativetoMexico,andfora few
hundred years after the Spaniards first brought the
flowers back to Europe, no one could get the beans to
grow anywhere else. In 1836 a Belgian horticulturalist figured
out why: They emerge from the flower only after it’s pollinated
by one of two rare species of bees native to Mesoamerica.
Five years after that discovery, a young slave named Edmond
Albius from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion (then called
Bourbon) realized he could hand-pollinate the orchids by
carefullymanipulatingthemaleandfemalepartsoftheplant.
Hisingenuitytransformedvanillaintoa cultivatablecrop,
andsmallplantations began popping up all over the world.
The orchids seemed to grow especially well in Madagascar,
500 miles due west of Réunion.
For the next 150 years, vanilla played it straight, drawing
little attention to itself. By the 1980s, Madagascar was pro-
ducing about 30% of the world’s supply. Government con-
trols kept prices tethered pretty tightly, to around $50 or $60
per kilo for cured beans. “You had some fluctuations, maybe
$10 up or down, but it was pretty stable,” says Craig Nielsen,
co-owner of Nielsen-Massey Vanillas Inc., a flavor company
based in Illinois and the Netherlands that’s dealt in theWeighing green vanilla beans at the
market in Tanambao Betsivakiny