The Vanilla Bean Is Being Endangered By Climate Change

Do you want to live in a world without vanilla? That could happen if world leaders don't get serious about controlling global climate change.

The following is part of an article in The New York Times by Prof. Aimee Nezhukumatathil (University of Mississippi):

Two years ago, scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden presented 225 people from nine cultures around the world with 10 different scents. All agreed that the scent of fresh vanilla was their favorite. From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla.

And the plant that produces it is in danger.

Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a very narrow band of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation.

Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. In 2017, a Category 4-equivalent cyclone decimated an estimated 30 percentof the vanilla vines in Madagascar, which produces 80 percent of the vanilla used around the globe. As a result, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to nearly $300 a pound. The increasingly erratic weather, along with pressure to cut the forests that harbor the orchids, is particularly worrisome for farmers who rely on this crop and wait up to four years for a single orchid to blossom. . . .

Because the production of real vanilla is so labor-intensive, scientists have experimented with creating substitutes. But many of these substitutes are terrible for the environment, creating large amounts of wastewater. . . .

It would be a pity to lose these soothing, warm sensations to something chemically made and one-dimensional, while the real deal gets relegated to the memory bins of an older generation. Mostly, I hope that we’ll learn to recognize the value and the time it takes to grow a single vanilla pod, especially in the tropical belt full of birdsong and bright-colored insects. Under that colorful canopy of wild and audacious feather and carapace, the pale vanilla orchid glows as if it were a sentinel, a lighthouse offering us a gentle warning before it’s too late.