Can Vanilla Farmers in Madagascar Balance Livelihoods, Food Security, and Forest Conservation?12/29/2024 Life is full of tradeoffs. For farmers in Madagascar, the choice is clear: vanilla is vital. Yet, balancing vanilla farming with growing food crops and preserving forest cover is complicated. Even with volatile markets and climate uncertainties, vanilla farming remains crucial to their livelihoods. Vanilla—a fragrant, glossy brown pod that adds a distinct flavor to desserts—holds the title of Madagascar's number one export. Up to 80% of the world’s natural vanilla comes from a small region in northeast Madagascar, where it serves as the main source of income for most households. However, continuing to grow vanilla comes with difficult risks and choices for farmers. Amid volatile global vanilla prices and mounting climate challenges, Malagasy farmers must navigate the delicate balance between sustaining their livelihoods, securing food, and conserving the forests that support their agroecosystems. In a new study, published in February 2025 in the journal Biological Conservation, a multidisciplinary and international team of researchers harnessed an innovative and creative approach to understand this challenging land-use dilemma: experimental games. The team worked with 204 farmers and used an experimental tablet-based game simulating real-world land-use decisions, played among six participants. The game accounted for ecological dynamics, such as soil depletion after successive years of farming, and the mosaic nature of traditional shifting agriculture. It also incorporated private and communal land-use dimensions to consider how these factors interact with cropland expansion. The game design, called FallowMe, was developed by experts at the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar; Cornell University; and the University of California, Davis, to explore human-environment dilemmas. The research was funded by USAID’s Partnership for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER). The game was also paired with choice experiments to assess how much farmers value vanilla monocultures compared to diversified systems. Farmers described the games as not only thought-provoking, but also fun, proving that even serious decisions can be explored through creative methods. These games are a cost-effective way to predict policy impacts while also fostering discussion. After each game, focus groups created a space to listen deeply to farmers’ perspectives, ensuring their voices shaped contextual findings. Thus, the study employed a mixed-methods approach, combining tools from different disciplines to capture a more comprehensive picture of the complexity of farmers’ decision-making processes and the interconnected challenges they face.
Compounding challenges: Volatile Vanilla Markets and Climate Risks For years, global vanilla prices have fluctuated dramatically, creating cycles of prosperity and hardship. Malagasy farmers face a tough dilemma: stick with vanilla, diversify crops, or expand farmland to offset price drops. These decisions are critical, especially with 70% of farmers in the region facing food insecurity. Unfortunately, expanding farmland often means clearing forests, threatening biodiversity and the ecosystem services upon which farmers rely. Climate change further complicates these decisions, with more intense cyclones and unpredictable weather threatening livelihoods and food security. This past March, cyclone Gamane brought heavy rains and flooding, displacing 220,000 people and devastating farmlands. Incentives and Risks Economists and climate experts have long advocated payments for ecosystem services to compensate farmers for leaving forests intact. These payments aim to provide a source of income for farming households while reaching conservation goals. For Malagasy farmers, however, every decision carries significant risk. They face a range of challenges, from the impacts of climate change and cyclones that destroy crops, to rapidly depleting soil quality and price shocks that threaten income stability. Farmers need strategies to 'hedge their bets.' Diversified cropping systems offer a potential solution. By integrating fruit trees, food crops, and other cash crops with vanilla, farmers can enhance resilience. Agroecology, which values traditional ecological knowledge, promotes such diversified practices, already familiar to many farmers. When vanilla prices skyrocket, the short-term incentive to plant monocultures often outweighs the benefits of diversification. As a climbing vine, vanilla requires a "tutor" tree on which to grow. In some cases, farmers cultivate it using a single tree species, pruned to remain under ten feet tall, creating a tree-based monoculture. This reliance on one crop increases risks from market fluctuations, pests, diseases, and extreme weather, ultimately diminishing overall resilience. What did we find? Farmers deeply value their vanilla, as it is tied to both their livelihoods and cultural identity. Despite market volatility, they remain committed to growing it. They also recognize the importance of a balanced land-use approach. In the face of shocks, diversification and a balanced landscape is key. Farmers aspire to create a balanced landscape where crop cultivation, livelihoods, and ecosystem health coexist. However, while shocks led to reduced vanilla-driven forest loss and encouraged crop diversification, they did not result in increased forest cover. According to focus groups, the link between diversification and conservation is shaped by land availability. Diversification typically occurs in response to hardships like price shocks or food shortages. This study found that women, in particular, tended to diversify more often than men, likely due to their role in ensuring household food security. The challenge remains: How can we support diversification as a proactive strategy rather than a reactive last resort—especially in the context of land scarcity? Payments for forest conservation can work, but their success depends on who receives them and the specific social and environmental conditions. In the virtual landscape, payments effectively incentivized forest protection on private land, supporting conservation efforts, but reduced farm diversity. These payments also had unintended consequences. For example, young farmers expanded farmland into public lands while benefiting from payments on their own plots—a phenomenon known as ‘leakage,’ where positive outcomes in one area lead to harm in another. Moreover, payments promoted less diverse, more uniform landscapes, favoring a ‘land sparing’ approach (focused on vanilla cultivation and protected forests) over a ‘land sharing’ approach, which integrates vanilla, diverse crops, and forests to ensure food security and ecosystem services. These patterns varied across study sites, underscoring the need for policies tailored to each community’s unique history, culture, and socioeconomic context, as well as accounting for disparities within and between farming communities. For instance, communities near Marojejy National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, have participated in significantly more conservation initiatives, whereas those without access to a national park have historically received limited support until until recently. Future Considerations This study highlights two under explored avenues for tackling these challenges. First, the development of youth-specific agricultural and land policies to mitigate the potential unintended consequences of payments, and second, the role of collective landholdings to address land scarcity and enhance conservation efforts during periods of environmental or economic shocks. Alongside these strategies, interventions such as expanding sustainable vanilla certification schemes, strengthening farmer cooperatives, implementing payments for conservation and restoration, and promoting agroecological diversification remain critical. While these approaches hold promise and are frequently discussed in scientific and policy circles, the true challenge lies in transforming diversification strategies from short-term coping mechanisms into thriving, long-term solutions. One organization tackling this challenge is the Duke Lemur Center's SAVA Conservation Initiative, which partners with communities to implement agroecological practices that address farmers’ needs while reducing pressure on forests. The two study sites in this research are among 15 sites across the SAVA region (Sambava, Andapa, Vohemar, and Antalaha) where the organization operates. However, agroecology is only one piece of the puzzle. Equally crucial is access to markets and fair value chains for diverse products. Future flexible and adaptive value chain approaches should focus on aggregating multiple farmer products, which may help both farmers and buyers adjust to novel seasonal variations—an increasingly important strategy as climate change disrupts cropping cycles. This research offers valuable insights for conservation planning, highlighting how well-designed ecosystem service payments can serve as equitable and just incentives for conservation. Importantly, it also fostered meaningful collaboration between international scientists and local communities, emphasizing the power of listening and co-creation.
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AuthorSharing science and stories. Marie is a PhD student exploring how land and relationships to land evolve over time, examining the drivers of transformation and the regenerative pathways that can heal both people and landscapes. Their research spans disciplines such as agroecology, social-ecological systems, and African studies. ArchivesCategories |