Prized by cooks around the world, Madagascar’s wild pepper faces a darkening future. Voatsiperifery, found nowhere else but on the island, is suffering both from its own success and from the destruction of the forests where it grows.
Its delicate aroma develops on vines that climb all the way to the canopy of the natural forests. Yet those forests lost 27 percent of their area between 1990 and 2025, according to the FAO. Harvesting makes matters worse. To reach the peppercorns without climbing, many pickers pull down the vine and sometimes fell the tree holding it up.
Northeast of Antananarivo, the village of Ambongamarina saw a genuine pepper rush some twenty years ago, drawn by the spice recognisable for its small woody tail, a remnant of its stem. The resource has since moved further away. Herinaina Randrianarimanga, a 51-year-old farmer, says that finding pepper now means a walk of almost a full day. The village is only 120 kilometres from the capital, but reaching it takes five hours by four-wheel drive.
The economic stakes are real. In France, its main market, Madagascar pepper sells for between 150 and 200 euros a kilo. The trade remains poorly regulated, however. According to Mima Chateauneuf, co-founder of the export company Jacarandas, there is no national system to track either harvesting or exports. With no rules in place, her company is betting on organic pepper, now a third of its exports, because the label requires traceability.
Cultivation could offer a way out. At Mandraka, 60 kilometres east of the capital, between 500 and 1,000 vines, the fruit of thousands of trials, grow on terraces cut into the forest. Those behind the project hope to copy the model of black pepper plantations in Vietnam or Brazil. Producing several hundred tonnes of wild pepper would, they say, be a windfall for the country’s economy.
This push to domesticate the vine is not new. CIRAD and FOFIFA, Madagascar’s agricultural research institute, have spent several years running programmes with pepper-picking villages to cultivate it. The aim is to turn a spice long gathered freely into a reason to protect the forests rather than a cause of their decline.