Wild times as Madagascar rides vanilla price bubble

Sava Region : Hit by rampant speculation and a collapse in production following cyclone Enawo, the price of vanilla -- Madagascar's largest export -- has surged in recent months.

Ice cream, aromatherapy, perfume and haute cuisine: all use the spice sourced from the Indian Ocean island which accounts for about 80 percent of global production.

The sudden cash bonanza has threatened to fuel crime and slash quality.

On the single paved road in Ampanefena, a rural community in the northeast of Madagascar, youths pass the time doing wheelies on their high-powered Japanese motorbikes. 

"It cost 200 million Malagasy ariary (12,00 euros, $14,000)," claimed Akman Mat-hon, 17, atop a Kawasaki too large for his frame. His father is "in vanilla" and bought the bike as a gift.

Business is booming: since 2015 the price of the spice has soared relentlessly to "a never-before seen peak of between $600 and $750 a kilo,"(510 and 640 euros) according to Georges Geeraerts, president of Madagascar's Group of Vanilla Exporters.

Since the market was liberalised in 1989, the price has fluctuated wildly -- from $400 a kilo in 2003 to $30 in 2005, where it stayed for roughly a decade. 

But demand eventually outstripped the supply of around 1,800 tonnes-a-year, spurred on by resurgent calls for organic products, speculation by financiers -- and by tropical cyclone Enawo which ravaged part of the production zone.

Markets in the vanilla-producing Sava region were saturated almost overnight with motorbikes, smartphones, solar panels, generators, flat-screen televisions and gaudy home furnishings.