Original Story Published by: Adam Harvey for Foreign Correspondent
Photo Source: ©Greg Nelson/ABC News
The price of vanilla in Madagascar is now worth more than silver, and growers are rushing to profit from the valuable crop.
A vanilla boom is upending lives on the impoverished Indian Ocean island of Madagascar.
Fortunes are made and lost in a single season as the vanilla price surges to be worth more than silver.
Growers are racing to cash in before vanilla thieves strike and strip their vines bare.
On the streets of Madagascar's vanilla capital, Sambava, fast-moving hustlers trade the bean like drugs.
And in the heart of vanilla country, some of the rarest primates in the world — including the white lemur, or silky sifaka — hang on precariously in one of the last surviving patches of Madagascar's virgin forest.
As few as 250 of them remain.
Tour guide Yockno Razafindramora sees his future in growing vanilla and has planted vines on every spare patch of his family's land.
Yockno Razafindramora is one of the Malagasy (the term refers to the people of Madagascar as well as their language) whose lives are being transformed by the vanilla boom.
He's one of his district's most respected tour guides, leading expeditions of tourists and international researchers to the mountain habitat of the silky sifaka — but he's being pulled down from the hills and back to the fields by the lure of the vanilla harvest.
"I'm jealous," he says. "I moved to Sambava but I heard and I saw that vanilla is crazy money.
"So I think I have to come back and plant more vanilla. Then I will get more money like everyone I saw here in the village.
