“It’s pretty likely that there is exactly one product from Madagascar in your home right now—no more, no less. That product is vanilla, and Madagascar is at the moment the world’s leading producer of this ubiquitous natural flavor—despite the fact that Madagascar is a very strange country to be the world’s leading producer of vanilla.Vanilla, at least the vanilla we eat, is not native to Madagascar; it originated some 10,000 miles away. Madagascar is also a chaotic place to do business, as an article in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine showed in 2019. The modern vanilla industry in Madagascar involves crushing poverty, splurge-producing wealth, theft, murder, and money laundering—in addition to natural disasters and the leveling of pristine forests.
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