Virginia Dare, Frontier Co-op partner to boost conditions of vanilla farmers in Madagascar
A new project by Frontier Co-op and Virginia Dare is tapping a regenerative agroforestry model to help smallholder vanilla farmers in Madagascar achieve stable incomes and cultivate food security. The partnership is also improving resiliency of the volatile vanilla market.
Nearly 80% of the world’s supply of vanilla is produced in Madagascar, making the market highly vulnerable to issues like severe weather, theft and adulteration.
These, among other factors, have created unstable financial cycles for smallholder farmers in Madagascar’s Sava region, and namely, seasons of financial “boom” and “bust,” according to Rebecca Skipp, source development manager at Frontier Co-op.
“The impacts of climate change and extreme weather have caused the cost of vanilla to really fluctuate from year to year,” she explained. “And it puts a significant strain then on the farmers and the communities that we source from … so there’s just a constant boom-and-bust cycle that surrounds vanilla pricing, and it makes it hard for farmers to really gain the financial stability that they need to be able to continue producing.”
That’s on top of the inherently “delicate nature” of the vanilla plant, which has to be hand-pollinated and requires around three years to grow.
Adding complexity to the problem is the lack of a centralized banking system in the region, Alicia Simmons, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) manager at Frontier Co-op, said, which leaves farmers to spend or “stash” their profits during a “boom” cycle, increasing the risk of theft and violence.