If you cook at all, there’s a good chance you’ve got a bottle of vanilla extract on hand. And it almost certainly says, right on the label, “Made in USA.”
This is technically accurate, even though the beans are almost certainly from Madagascar, where the US imports nearly all of its vanilla.
And yet, those same beans traveled to a US processing facility, got soaked in alcohol and water, and became extract, which was enough to naturalize them as full-blown Americans under international food law.
Madagascar grows most of the world’s vanilla
What that label doesn’t tell you is that those beans came from the SAVA region in Madagascar’s humid north, grown by roughly 70,000 smallholder farmers who hand-pollinate every single flower during a tiny annual window when the orchids bloom, then cure the beans over months of daily sweating and sun-drying. Those farmers go on to earn between 5% and 20% of the final market value of what they produce. The country that soaks the beans in alcohol gets the credit.
But that’s about to be debated. And not just for vanilla. This also applies to dried garlic, oregano, ginger, cloves, saffron, and more.
In May, delegates from roughly two dozen countries will convene in Ottawa for the 49th Session of the Codex Committee on Food Labelling, a body whose name is Latin for “food law” and which has been producing careful multilateral output destined for regulatory annexes since 1963.
The question on the table: should spice labels be required to disclose not just the ‘country of origin,’ but the ‘country of harvest’ — meaning where the crop actually came out of the ground. Under the standard on the books since 1985, origin is wherever a food undergoes processing that “changes its nature.” So ‘Made in USA’ is not a lie. It is something more useful than a lie: a true statement carefully engineered to tell you as little as possible.
The fault lines in Ottawa map back to who makes money where. Producing countries favor mandatory ‘country of harvest’ disclosures. Processing and importing countries have reservations. A working paper prepared for the meeting is candid about the tension: some members support mandatory disclosure as a fraud prevention and economic protection measure for growers; others argue it would add complexity and trade barriers without fixing the actual problem of deliberate mislabeling.
None of this happens in a vacuum. The price of vanilla is set in commodity markets in New York and London, by people who have never seen a vanilla orchid, based on supply signals that reach growers too late to act on. Country of harvest labeling won’t fix that. But a label that names the source creates the precondition for everything that might: consumer awareness, sourcing accountability, and the kind of brand equity that could, eventually, give producers in developing economies some leverage over the value of their own crops.
What the May meetings in Ottawa will likely produce is not a mandate but a clarification: that sorting and packaging don’t change a food’s nature, that multi-origin blends should declare all origins, and that voluntary country of harvest disclosure is always permitted. Which it already was. In bureaucratic terms, progress. In practical terms, not much.
Ultimately, this strikes at the question of what a food label is for. If it exists to describe the last stop in a manufacturing chain, then the current rules are fine. If it exists to give consumers an honest account of where their food comes from and who produced it — and to extend some basic visibility to the people at the bottom of global supply chains — then the rules are badly out of date. The global food system has evolved dramatically. The labeling framework has not. Ottawa is a chance, however small, to close that gap.
The countries that hand-pollinate the orchid have one answer about what should happen next. The countries that make the extract have another. The world food law body is being asked to pick a side. Whether it will, we’ll see.