Jacob Sebastian no longer wants to invest in his vanilla plantation. He still has more than 1,000 vanilla plants intercropped in his half hectare (ha) rubber plantation in Kerala’s Kottayam district. But this year he did not hand pollinate these plants. In a nearby plantation, P J Joseph uprooted 1,250 plants that grew on one third of his 1.2 ha farm. Joseph is now planning to grow only rubber in this area. In adjoining Eranakulam district, Ibrahim, a small-time farmer, has removed all his vanilla plants from 0.8 ha of his coconut plantation.

The story repeats in other parts of Kerala as well. Farmers say the business of vanilla has let them down. The crop is highly labour-intensive and takes time to flower, the seed takes even longer to cure. It’s literally a labour of love. Vanilla does not self pollinate. In nature, vanilla is only pollinated by the Mexican bee and humming birds. But these are found only in Mexico and all attempts to make them work in other regions have failed.

Farmers here have to ‘manually’ pollinate the flower. But the flower of vanilla lasts about one day, sometimes even less, so farmers have to check every day for flowers they can pollinate. Then they use a sliver of bamboo, or a pin or needle or even a toothpick to separate the anther and the stigma and press the anther on the stigma. The flower then pollinates. The bean is born.

This green bean does not have any flavour. It now has to be cured—a time- consuming process taking up to six months. About five to six kg of green beans when processed, give a kg of cured beans. The final stage is the one in which the vanilla is extracted from the beans. This is a process that has been tightly controlled globally and demands high price. This is when vanilla, the spice of life, is finally ready to use.

In the 1990s, when the spices board in India tried to persuade farmers to take up vanilla cultivation, there were hardly any takers. The reason was that till 1996, the trade and the price of vanilla was tightly controlled through a cartel (known as Univanille) based in Madagascar and so the price remained low and volatile.
But things changed in 2000. That year, Madagascar was hit by the cyclone Hudah and a severe drought struck Indonesia. Vanilla prices sky-rocketed. This high in prices set off a gold rush in India. In 2002, farmers began with incomes of Rs 1,250 for a kg of green beans (against the Rs 50 they are being offered in 2007); by 2003 prices had peaked to Rs 3,500 per kg.

But the gold rush did not last long. Madagascar and Indonesia revived: beans from these countries were back in business. Prices crashed like never before. One reason, market observers say, is because the high prices of 2000-2004 scared users of vanilla into switching to the artificial alternative. It was lot cheaper compared to the natural variety and, quite significantly, a lot more stable in terms of price.

Most Indian vanilla farmers are today told they can sell their produce at Rs 50 per kg. The area under vanilla has gone down: from 5,800 ha in the three vanilla- growing states in 2005 to 5,100 ha in 2006.

Paul Jose, managing director of Vanilco, a cooperative, which purchases vanilla beans from over 25,000 farmers in the region, blames the government for the state of affairs. He points out that while marketing vanilla to Indian farmers, the government had talked of developing the domestic vanilla market by introducing compulsory labelling in ice-creams and other products. Vanilco, he says, has reminded Union government officials of these commitments, but to little avail.

At a meeting with vanilla farmers in 2005, Union minister for commerce Kamal Nath had promised help. But not much has happened since then. In 2006, the Union minister of state for commerce, Jairam Ramesh, had given assurance that the commerce ministry would make it mandatory for all ice creams labelled and sold as “Vanilla Ice Cream,” to contain a minimum of 1 per cent natural vanilla in it. “A year has passed, and it is still a mystery why even a meeting that was scheduled has not taken place,” Jose says.

Counterfeit has conquered the world in today’s food industry. While the world trade in natural vanilla is at around 2,000 tonnes of cured beans or approximately 50 tonnes vanilla extract, the demand for synthetic vanillin in 2004 was more than 30,000 tonnes a year. In India, about 700 tonnes of synthetic vanilla was imported in 2004, bought by ice cream companies and other users.

Companies say they prefer the chemical alternative because it is cheaper. Also, unlike that of the original compound, prices of the artificial variety do not fluctuate, throwing production out of gear. Therefore industries, which make a lot of common edible products — from ice cream, biscuits, confectionery to beverages — have switched to the synthetic copy. But they have never told us about the switch-over.

The companies in this business are the biggest of the big—including the agri-giant Monsanto. A key supplier in India is the US multinational, International Flavours and Fragrance, which interestingly is also in the business of exporting vanilla beans.

The 2005 Export-Import Bank of India (EXIM bank) study on vanilla and its potential in India says that labelling laws for ice cream can create a viable domestic market for the essence in the country. Vanilla flavoured ice cream accounts for over 40 per cent of the sales in the country and this industry is one of the key users of this product. But currently, almost all the vanilla we eat is artificial, not natural.

The EXIM bank study estimates that even if, “A mere 11 per cent of the present synthetic vanillin used in ice cream industry is converted to natural vanillin use, the demand for about 15 tonnes of natural vanillin would be created. This would mean a demand for 750 tonnes of cured vanilla beans, almost eight times the current production of the country.”

Currently, in India, only Amul has launched its all natural flavour called Vanilla Royale. It is buying small quantities of extract from Vanilco. Mother Dairy, the ice cream brand of the National Dairy Development, is conducting pilot trials of its new all-natural ice cream. The company expects a commercial launch in 2-3 months.

The Bureau of Indian Standards has specifications for ice cream. This standard which was last revised in 1995 makes no distinction between ice cream using natural flavours and ones that use natural identical flavouring substances.

But there is another twist to the ice cream tale. To manufacture commercial ice cream, the product is pumped with air to give it the creamy texture and volume. The air component can comprise anywhere between 30 to 60 per cent of its total volume. In the case of Milma the air component is about 44.5 per cent—for every litre of ice cream mix, Milma gets approximately 1.80 litres of ice cream. So for every litre of processed vanilla ice cream, Milma only spends Rs. 2.20 for flavouring it naturally while it used to spend Rs 0.38 with synthetic vanillin. In Milma’s case the difference of cost comes to about Rs 1.92 per litre. The EXIM bank study corroborates this. It notes that “use of natural vanilla concentrates may increase the final price to the consumers by about Rs 0.40 to Re 0.60 for every 200 ml cup of pure vanilla ice cream”. Clearly, this cannot be too high a price to pay.

The essence of it
Vanilla is assessed on the basis of its principal flavour and aroma compound—vanillin. All this, in turn, is influenced by where the bean is grown, how it is grown and cured. Vanilla from Madagascar, the Comores and Reunion islands is called the Bourbon type, which sets the industry’s standard for highend beans. Indonesia, which harvests its beans early, has captured the low quality bean market. But analysts say Indonesian beans are fast catching up in their flavour and quality.

Madagascar is the leader in vanilla, controlling over half the world’s market. India made a relatively late entry into world trade but its stock is rising. In 2006-07, India produced 230 tonnes of cured beans, more than 10 per cent of the world production of over 2,000 tonnes of cured beans.

Kerala leads the production of vanilla beans in India with a share of more than 52 per cent. Last year, Kerala alone produced 122 tonnes of cured beans or close to 660 tonnes of green beans, followed by Karnataka with 88 tonnes and Tamil Nadu with 22 tonnes of cured beans.

Effluent vanilla
What we have in our food, in our beverages, in our cosmetics and fragrances, is a synthetic extract, which has copied the smell of vanilla and captured it in a bottle.

This smell has been harvested from, believe it or not, effluent waste of a paper mill or coal tar components used in petrochemical plants. Artificial vanillin was first synthesised in 1874 in Germany when scientists successfully replicated the chemical signature of vanillin (3-methoxy-4-hydroxy-benzaldehyde). In 1890, French chemists created vanillin from eugenol found in clove. Eugenol was the main source of vanillin till the 1920s. In the early 1900s, came the discovery of vanilla from paper mill waste.

In 1922, the Ontario Paper Company in Canada had no way to dispose off huge amounts of sulphite liquor laced with lignin, which was polluting nearby streams. Chemists found that this waste had something that smelled like vanilla and a counterfeit was born. Lignin, which binds together the fibres in wood, is the waste product in the process of paper making. To remove lignin from fibre, paper companies ‘boil’ wood with caustic soda. This waste, after the wood fibre is removed for paper making, is called black liquor or sulphide liquor. This is the worst effluent of a paper company.

The vanilla we love to eat in our food comes from this effluent waste of the paper mill. A method has been devised to extract vanillin from the lignin. In this, sulphite liquor is cooked and lignin is extracted from it. The lignin is then purified to get Lignin Vanillin also known as USP Vanillin.

Then there is the petrochemical route. The petrochemical raw material guaiacol is a component of coal tar. Coal tar is chemically processed to replicate natural vanillin. It has a stronger flavour profile than lignin vanillin or natural vanillin. But this ethyl vanillin needs to be used in minute quantities as it might impart a harsh “chemical” character to food.
CSE/Down to Earth Feature Service