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Perfume of the Pacific Colombia prepares for a vanilla boom Purveyors of scented products and posh ice-creams take note Vanilla is “a product of time and patience”, says Cristian Garcia Murillo. In 2016 his father trained vines around cacao trees on their farm in El Valle, a town on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Last year Mr Murillo sold 50kg of cured pods, partly supplied by local growers, to restaurants across the country. It is a sweet deal. One kilogram fetches up to 2.5m pesos ($600), more than 100 times what the region’s fishermen net for the same weight of tuna. Vanilla, an orchid, is native to Central and South America. In the 18th century vines were smuggled from Mexico to Europe and later implanted in Réunion, where a child slave discovered how to hand-pollinate them. Today nearby Madagascar provides 80% of global supply. Because vanilla is still usually hand-pollinated, it is the world’s most expensive spice after saffron. Demand has outstripped supply for years. Buye
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