WeekendLongRead:InaTumultuousMadagascar,ChineseExpatsFindOpportunityinVanilla

After the Lunar New Year, Luo Ming was back at his office, a bare-bones room attached to a small processing plant about a two-hour drive from Sambava, the city at the heart of Madagascar’s vanilla belt.

Madagascar is the world’s largest source of vanilla, supplying about 80% of global output. During buying season, Luo spends most days moving from village to village in a beat-up pickup truck, bumping over muddy red roads to check ripeness, bargain with growers and choreograph logistics that can collapse with a single storm.

The past few months have tested him — and nearly every Chinese merchant doing business on the island — in ways that go well beyond weather.

Looking for a new life

Madagascar, an island nation off Africa’s southeastern coast, is among the world’s poorest countries. World Bank data showed more than 75% of the population lives below the poverty line, defined as less than $1.90 in daily disposable income. Over the past five years, the population has grown 2.9% annually while the economy expanded about 1.8% — a gap that strains weak infrastructure and deepens tensions over energy, schooling and health care.

From late September 2025, large protests erupted across multiple regions after prolonged water shortages and power outages. By mid-October, the situation deteriorated: parts of an elite force mutinied, and the military soon announced it had taken control and formed a transitional government.

A senior advisor to Madagascar’s transitional government visits Sambava, at the heart of the country’s vanilla belt, on Nov. 11. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

Luo Ming, representing local Chinese vanilla growers and traders, participates in talks organized by the transitional government in Sambava on Nov. 11. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

The timing could hardly have been worse for vanilla growers as October is the critical harvest window. The coup disrupted transportation across wide areas. On nearly 20% of plantations, pods rotted unpicked. Some ports closed, trapping goods in limbo. If instability dragged on, Luo said, global vanilla prices could jump 30%, raising costs for industries from ice cream to perfume.

In mid-November, Luo, acting as a representative for local Chinese growers and traders, joined talks organized by the transitional government to search for a way forward.

Luo was born in the 1990s in Yongzhou, Hunan province. At 18, he left for the manufacturing city of Dongguan in South China’s Guangdong province, where he worked 13.5-hour shifts on a shoe factory assembly line for modest pay. It was five years of repetition until a workplace accident left him with a severe hand injury. The factory’s compensation amounted to just one month’s wages. The lesson, he decided, was clear: For his life to improve, he would have to keep studying.

He enrolled in an English program at South China Normal University’s continuing education school. On Christmas Day in 2015, at a classmate’s invitation, he crossed the ocean and arrived in Madagascar.

The economy was underdeveloped, but Sambava’s steady blue skies and mild climate held him. He fell in love with a local woman. In 2016, their child was born, and Luo decided to stay.

Sambava, the capital of the Sava region in the country’s northeast, is effectively cut off from the capital, Antananarivo. There is no direct highway, and the trip can stretch to roughly 1,300 kilometers (807.8 miles). Prices run high. At first, Luo tried whatever he could: selling electronics, then beverages. The work was hard and margins were thin.

As economic cooperation between China and Madagascar deepened, he spotted an opening and settled on vanilla trading — a business that doesn’t require heavy investment in factories or cause obvious pollution. It can feed China’s large consumer market while creating jobs locally.

A worker hand-pollinates vanilla in November at a plantation in Sambava. This step is considered the most difficult part of growing vanilla. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

Luo checks the quality of vanilla at his processing plant in Sambava in November. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

Buying vanilla, though, can feel like an endurance sport. Once, traveling from a distant production area, Luo carried oversized bags and stitched together a route on foot, by tractor, in canoes and on ferries, purchasing vanilla in villages inside primary forest. The 200-plus-kilometer journey began at 3 a.m. and didn’t end until 5 p.m.

Processing is exacting. After the pods mature, they must be “killed” — heat-treated to stop growth — then dried under strict controls to become the high-priced product buyers want. On trips to the countryside, Luo carries a heavy vacuum-sealing machine and packaging, and he often hauls tens of kilograms of uncured pods. After reaching a village guesthouse, he said, the first job is spreading the pods in the sun.

Vanilla cultivation depends heavily on hand pollination, which scatters market power across countless small farmers with limited bargaining leverage. To keep the supply chain stable, Luo has tried to make purchasing more transparent: public contract terms, pricing linked to seasonal international futures assessments, and longer-term supply relationships. He has also invested in basic processing points in villages, training young people in grading, roasting and storage control.

Villagers call him “Lao Ming,” a nickname in local language that means “the merchant who comes back.” In other words, he’s not someone who takes one season’s profit and disappears. “Only by understanding their logic can you build trust,” Luo said. “People in vanilla are really doing business with time.”

By September 2025, Luo’s plant employed more than 100 workers, most of them young people or women from vanilla-growing villages. He also works with more than 1,000 farm households.

As his business steadied, more friends from China began visiting to scout opportunities. In his spare time, Luo posted scenes from daily life online. The posts drew tens of thousands of followers and turned him into a kind of digital guide for Chinese tourists considering Madagascar.

Putting down roots

By estimates, Madagascar is home to roughly 50,000 to 80,000 ethnic Chinese and Chinese nationals, including descendants who have become citizens of the African country. Focusing only on newcomers who arrived in the past decade, the population is estimated at 15,000 to 25,000.

On an island nation of fewer than 30 million people, their economic footprint outweighs their numbers.

Chinese settlement here dates to the early 20th century, when some families fled war and relocated to the east coast port of Toamasina. Today, about 70% of the community is concentrated in and around Antananarivo and its surrounding industrial zones. Toamasina draws roughly 20%, anchored in trade and logistics. The remainder is spread across regional centers such as Toliara and Mahajanga — a distribution that mirrors where roads, ports and commerce are most workable for newcomers choosing where to land.

Earlier generations clustered in wholesale and retail, restaurants and other traditional trades. Newer arrivals have expanded quickly into manufacturing, construction and telecommunications. In recent years, more Chinese businesses have moved into agriculture — especially vanilla cultivation and export — pushing investment into the country’s comparative-advantage industries.

Chinese companies account for an estimated 15% to 20% of the private economy. In textiles and building materials, their market share exceeds 50%. The prominence of Chinese-funded infrastructure projects has also brought waves of short-term engineers and managers.

A Chinese couple run their supermarket in May 2019 in Antalaha, Madagascar. The husband, a Guangdong native, was 97 years old at the time. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

Mimi, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in Sambava, cuts up fruit in 2019. Her father arrived from Shunde, Guangdong, in 1920 and married a descendant of local Chinese immigrants. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

On Madagascar’s uncertain red soil, individual stories tend to rhyme with resilience.

Li Zhaochang runs the Mimi restaurant in Sambava, as well as a travel agency. He describes himself as a third-generation overseas Chinese. His grandfather arrived from Shunde, Guangdong province, around 1920 and later served as head of the local Chinese association. Over a century, Sambava’s 400 to 500 Chinese residents have often relied on coffee and vanilla. They may keep to themselves day to day, but in crises they pull together — and many have built deep friendships with Malagasy neighbors.

Gao Qin, a young volunteer Chinese teacher dispatched through a Confucius Institute program, arrived in Sambava in 2018 to teach at Orchid Middle School. Because Malagasy interpreters who speak Chinese can earn relatively high incomes, interest among young people in learning Chinese is strong.

Far from the coast, in remote mining areas, Liu Xiuguo from Jiangsu has spent nearly 20 years hustling in Madagascar. He speaks fluent Malagasy and deals in mineral specimens such as crystal. For him, prospecting and finding reliable local guides are the toughest parts. “All the operations and collection for export goods here have to rely on local foremen,” Liu said.

On a land of sudden reversals, he has learned that respecting local rules and forming a community with locals is the only durable survival strategy.

Gao Qin, a Chinese-language teacher dispatched by the Confucius Institute, teaches a class at Orchid Middle School in Sambava. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

Liu Xiuguo, a native of Jiangsu province who trades in crystal and minerals, climbs with locals in a stone forest in 2023. Photo: Zhang Xinmin

An unsettled future

Madagascar, the world’s fourth-largest island, has cycled through political crises since its first republic was established in 1960. Only about one-third of the country has access to electricity, and power is expensive. Just 46% of the population has safe drinking water and only 15% have adequate sanitation. A rural transport index indicates only 11.4% of the population has access to a good network of roads. More than 80% of children and teenagers under 18 live below the poverty line, and roadside villages still reflect deeply traditional subsistence farming.

In September 2025, young locals took to the streets over water and electricity cuts, and former President Andry Rajoelina stepped down. It remains unclear how the military will answer public demands and deliver reform. Going into 2026, the social situation has gradually steadied under the transitional government’s control, and trade routes have reopened.

Luo’s child is now 10, fluent in Malagasy and French but barely speaks Chinese — which pains Luo. He is looking for an opportunity to send the child back to China for systematic Chinese-language education.

His vision for the future is otherwise concrete: go deeper into vanilla trading and learn Malagasy in a structured way. “Once you get past the language barrier, you can build deeper trust with local people, and you can share the best vanilla from here with the world,” Luo said.

He has another goal on the calendar, too — a domestic one. When he saves enough, he wants to buy a spacious plot in Sambava and build a large house for his family. On a red island where the smell of vanilla lingers, he wants to make a home.

Chen Jiayu contributed to the story.

Contact editor Lu Zhenhua (zhenhualu@caixin.com)