Our Responsibility

Quality and Ethical Angle | NGO/Partner Outreach (for Serious Charities IN Madagascar only) | Sustainability Optics & Oddities | USAID, JICA, Climate-Media Political Economy

We see it as our life’s work and a real passion (for the island and for the spice) to do nothing but vanilla, and nothing but the best vanilla, and to focus on quality during the inevitable ebbs and flows in the local green vanilla market and world black vanilla market prices.

Our planifolia (Madagascar doesn’t grow Tahitensis) orchids go and grow in 3-4 year cycles and so we don’t set the price at the time of planting a vinepole grid or secondary forest, but tag and track the reality of the harvest year rate gradients at the time of cutting and curing at maturity, and offer you the same quality stably and smoothly (our plants are protected from cyclones as well with serious pole draft and canopy shelter) every year, with pricing squarely below the average farmgate rate in the vanilla coast and the southern Masoala-Maroa rim farm cluster.

We deliver you the best vanilla you’ve ever had, or your money back! – All beans are fresh, delicious, unbelievably fragrant (compare to any other company on the web, and compare the wax boxes we send you from Mada to the suffocated stale beans of 3rd-stage traders abroad), and come of higher quality than any other vanilla on the market to consumers.

MVC beans all come 100% natural and:

• Organically Grown (Genuinely and not just “optically” or “certified” organic)
• Fair Trade (Usually in fact higher than fair trade parity payment to growers and staff)
• GMO-Free (GMO isn’t possible or available in the first place in Madagascar)
• Gluten-Free (Gluten has nothing to do with vanilla)
• Certified Organic (USDA, Ecocert, and JAS)
• Natural and Irreplaceable by Science
• 230 Distinct Chemical Compounds contribute the the flavor of REAL Madagascar Vanilla. Accept nothing less!

We are extremely close to the realities of conservation and development in the greenest tracts of the primary and secondary forests. If you have any proposal to reach out that involves demonstrably helping quality of life benchmarks for the vanilla coast and metrics of forest and wildlife preservation in the vanilla coast and jungle corridor, contact us @ Earth’s most unique island, where 85% of the species and all of the culture is endemic. 

To date the only 2 effective and successful initiatives which we support are the Duke Lemur Center and Blue Ventures, and any conservation projects will be scrutinized as much or more for their performance and intelligence than a business or yield of vanilla would.

Sustainable Vanilla (and lack thereof) : Various sustainability inuendos and illusions in Madagascar

What can be done to actually make vanilla sustainable and ethical on-the-ground, not just on-the-label and PR/ESG terms?

If vanilla importers of the west and Asia want to save the rainforest and keep the payments for planters at lovely and livable wages, they need to buy or endow with cash locally controlled cross-checked custodial tracts of the primary forest and later-growth secondary forest trees with the largest diameter canopies.

As the land in these areas is still very cheap in Madagascar for 99 year leases, and are easily regulated with make small servicing footpaths with geotag rechargeable GPS transmitters, appointing vanilla custodians would work well here with duties of keeping the forest checked and of opening these tracts for ecotourism and research camp rentals. That’s the most trackable and tractable way to economize and encourage Malagasy motivations keeping the forest clean, nice, generally unhunted, and to monetize the upkeep.

Secondly and naturally, farmers already keep orchid planting in appropriate places inside and astride the secondary forest and manmade buffer plantations. Orchids can go under the periphery secondary forets on their vince guidepoles and the vanilla plants also straddle the fenced borders along roads, and the hedges and bushes of ricefields, mudtracts, and lower ground plants. Vanilla itself in an endemic ecosystem in Madagascar is fine and not a parasite or exclusionary harmful competitor under the canopies of species that give it shelter. Most of its host trees the vine will climb and hang from also give deciduous foliage for returning nutrients to the underlying soil. Vanilla doesn’t invasively choke out competing plants if left to grow wild either.

When ESG rears its head in discussions that take place outside Madagascar which talk about and for Madagascar, foreign importers and their boardrooms just drive and distort the price with sustainable parlance right into favorable brackets for their base prices, to make margins on sale prices still to their customer base. To greenwash this behavior they usually take a few pictures of smiling farmers (who never if hardly ever see them,) and meanwhile battle with the Malagasy government price fixing, that functions on the other side of the paywall and imex barrier.

The entire yield of CNV export tax and other vanilla taxes for Madagascar, while contested as a burden to local companies, is pennies and pittance compared to the sprawling budgets of megacap food companies in USA Japan Germany and France, and to the revenues they intake that could also be deployed for combatting doforestation and wage depression. 

It is possible today with the greatest of ease to walk across the entirety of Sava by foot and not once see a single employee or staff dedicated to sustainable agriculture reporting or regulating. Furthermore it is hard to see a single foreigner or English speaker in most of the farmlands and forests of Madagascar in the first place, and impossible to ask much less to ascertain the prices that the small-plot farmers are getting for their beans at an authentic appraisal. 

Half or more of price reports from anybody in the vanilla business are either inflated or deflated in the direction of wishful thinking and anticipation of competition or commerce, to mislead or misinform. Malagasy freemarket pricing is historically smarter than either price-boosting “fairtrade” frauds (meant to charge more in the chain) or government  “rate regulations” (also meant to do this.) – The market finds mechanisms as well to enforce real prices despite the best efforts of both.

The entirety of vanilla coast and vanilla green and black local market reporting is also literally done by word of mouth and the American Facebook platform. Farmers have been known to rebate, exporters to overbill and triage/triangulate funds, expenses are murky to eject excess cash, and despite all the creativity in the arms race of the growers nad the government on the island, Madagascar wholly still profits less from vanilla, (both the government and growers, despite their differences) than the outer world does in Europe and the USA and Asia. 

“Sustainable vanilla” for the west is also a euphemism or codeword for “find crappier cheaper stuff to blend for our bottom line’s recipe receipts,” and like whiskey marketing tricks, it is in practice  tailings mixed with the true terrific beans, to try to foist a flavor solution friendly to customer wallets still able to cost compensate for a lack of power over the price of Madagascar’s cost of all its vanilla exported.

Sustainable can also be conflated to mean “cheap for importers” (We want more savings on ingredient costs, so need to diversify or devalue our vanilla supply so we don’t pay as much, not because we can’t get it, but because it’s more expensive than we want it to be.) Sustainable from this side means lower pricing that doesn’t raise as often.

Sustainable can also be conflated to mean “expensive for exporters” (we want more money to provide farmers better livelihoods or to say we are…even though they are really the people we buy from and not actually us, and so we don’t actually want to give them more margins actually, as it’s a conflict of our direct interest and a common sense trick..) Sustainable from this side means higher pricing that raises often.

The truth for importers that there is always a way to get vanilla if they pay more, but they don’t want to. 

The truth for exporters that there is always a way to sell more vanilla if they are paid less, but they don’t want to.

So sustainability has often become a cynical PR exercise on both sides that is perfectly positioned to argue your price take up or down, both in the name of so-called “sustainability.” Vanilla farmers will always grow and take good care of vanilla production if they can sell it and the demand speaks for itself. They will sell it for as much as they can get for it, and the most sustainable practice is to get out of the way of that, stop making up extra marketing stickers and labels to foist higher prices, and stop blocking other farmers who really need to make a living on it to pump up a few lucky self-styled “green”washed gods of industry.

Amazingly uneducated buyer groups will never bring this up because their chief priority is actually profits and the optics, often so halfheartedly blasted as to be parodies, of caring about faraway locals. There are none of these foreigners living in the vanilla villages, anywhere in Madagascar, and so their experience is, literally, literature.

Ethical practice in the wholistic world of vanilla would actually entail reversing the focus away from PR and the internet world into the physical world and building roads and rainforest integrity on both sides of Masoala and the corridor to the Vanilla coast, and only arguing for prices reflective of market realities and not in favor of market distortions. 

An export tax per kg on vanilla and associated forest-front crops that goes straight into preserving parks on both sides would be very helpful to preserving the vanilla quality and the vanilla coast and its ecosystems, but may be unrealistic or likely to unravel into graft and gamification quickly in Madagascar. Such a measure could conceivably be done via USDA or the EU, tagging part of the duty/any duty for import of the crop into US borders from Mada origin on vanilla to very laser-targeted partnerships on parks and forests on that specific (vanilla) plants’ growing areas, but a mechanism internationally would need to be worked out through the DoS.

Unfortunately, the US government’s new (and now climate-religious fundamentalist) deployment of development funds is almost wholly centered around climate change and desertification in the south that may not be wholly or even much partially due to climate change as a primary driver in the first place in recent or ancient human history. As terrible as it is for those in the tracts from Tulear to the tip of the southern cape, the focus is reactionary to an observation not to a cause, and not preventative here.

The optics of climate politics have forcefully steered the American coffers of dollars to the south in the name of food security, but really in the name of politics in DC. These funds and “assistance armies” of consultants are a positive force for nutrition and agro in the dry dusty desertified south in the 2010’s and 2020’s, but are wholly missing in protection of any of the old primary rainforests or places with the green that is left, like Masoala or the verdant corridor that runs from there west of the vanilla coast almost up to Vohemar.

“Project to promote agriculture and crop diversification in response to climate change in Madagascar’s south:
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has launched a project to promote agriculture and crop diversification in response to climate change, aiming to improve food security and help farmers adapt to a changing environment.”

Immediately upon the announcement of this funding, over 30 “consultancy” firms in the DC/VA/MD area piled in writing to MVC to ask in general how to get some of this American money in 2024…There were literally only 4 local companies in the entirety of Madagascar’s south that we are acquainted with who even knew this funding was available. None of them, not 1, had the language skill nor the long-winded marathon grant-writing wherewithal to apply to ask for a dollar of it directly…

The single largest investment by Asia in Madagascar, and by Japan into anywhere in Africa, and the largest Asian investment ever in Madagascar in its history, is by Sumitomo Corporation, and Japan is massively and mainly deployed to assist in livelihoods and implementation of development around the principal port. The port is one of the main exit/transit points of vanilla (Tamatave) and not just electronics metals, and thus many of the JICA initiatives center around the southern spice region where some vanilla, cloves, and peppers transit out of.