You may have noticed that the price of vanilla has skyrocketed in the past 10 years.
This spice, which mostly grows in Madagascar, is a staple for cooking and seasoning, and a perfect storm of factors has driven up the price to ten times what it was in 2015.
This has been a boon for vanilla farmers, but it also created problems, including the theft of crops and much higher prices for goods in the towns around vanilla farms.
Isaac Castellano is an associate clinical professor at Boise State’s School of Public Service, and he’s been studying what’s going on in Madagascar and how private militias are cropping up to protect the vanilla crops, and he joined Idaho Matters to tell us more about his research.
