busyBlight hits world's vanilla supply
Savour the egg-nog while you can - a lethal disease is wiping out vanilla plantations in Madagascar, the world's major producer of the spice. Last week Simeon Rakotomamonjy and his team at the National Center for Research Applied to Rural Development in Antananarivo reported that an unknown fungus has struck 80 per cent of plantations in two of the country's main growing areas.
No matter what you are growing, if you don't take good care of it, you will have problems. *sigh* I use vanilla extract in almost all my ice cream recipes and many other things as well.
December 23 2008, 05:05:48 UTC 12 years ago
December 23 2008, 05:32:39 UTC 12 years ago
Unfortunately, vanilla is really, really hard to take good care of.
Humans cannot plant vanilla seeds. Well, nothing would happen if they did, anyway. Like most orchid seeds, vanilla seeds do not contain any food for the young plant and can't sprout. A symbiotic fungus grows into the seed and feeds the baby vanilla plant until it grows enough to make leaves and start feeding itself.
The symbiotic fungus is, of course, not native to Madagascar, and we haven't succeeded in cultivating it. So in Madagascar, they get new vanilla plants by cutting pieces off the old ones an convincing the pieces to grow roots with chemicals. So all the Madagascar plants are genetically identical, infertile, and cloned. If disease can kill one of them, they'll all die.
Some of the Mexican vanilla plants are grown in a more haphazard, natural way (since the important fungus is native to Mexico and is able to help the vanilla plant the way it is supposed to), and they tend to be a lot more healthy and disease resistant.
On the other hand, some "Mexican vanilla" is made from tonka bean, which contains liver-damaging chemicals. Whee!
December 23 2008, 10:45:18 UTC 12 years ago
So far it's only hitting one cultivar.
December 23 2008, 18:13:11 UTC 12 years ago