A Pullman-based conservation organization is helping preserve habitat for a rare-yet-pungent Madagascar spice | Food News | Spokane | The Pacific Northwest Inlander

On Nov. 6 — Election Day — most Americans were heading to the polls, but recent Washington State University graduate Cullen Anderson was heading to the airport. His destination: Madagascar, the island nation off Africa’s southeastern coastline. Formerly a French colony, and technically the Republic of Madagascar, it was historically revered — and exploited — for its timber and spices, like ginger, chiles, black pepper and, especially, cloves and vanilla.

Among these natural resources, pepper is of special interest to the Pullman-based Phoenix Conservancy, founded in 2016 by Chris Duke, who recently completed his doctoral studies in biology at WSU where he met Anderson through mutual acquaintances.

“The Phoenix Conservancy’s mission is to restore endangered ecosystems for the communities that depend on them and for the conservation of biodiversity,” says Anderson, the conservancy’s Madagascar project manager. He also notes the nongovernmental organization’s prior efforts addressed Palouse and Great Plains ecosystem restoration.

Why Madagascar?

“Madagascar’s rainforest met all three of our project criteria,” explains Duke. It’s less than 10 percent intact, highly biodiverse and is a location “where our organization has a pragmatic opportunity to make a measurable impact.”

The voatsiperifery pepper is a focus of the organization’s global conservation efforts. Meaning fruit (voa) and vine (tsiperifery) in Malagasy (the language spoken on Madagascar and how the island’s 29 million or so inhabitants refer to themselves), the fruit becomes peppercorns when dried.

Like much of Madagascar’s flora and fauna, voatsiperifery is unique to the island, like the island’s rare sifaka lemurs or the cougar-esque fossa. It only grows on trees at the edge of Madagascar’s shrinking rainforests, “so demand for the pepper translates closely to direct demand for [the] rainforest itself,” Anderson says.

Voatsiperifery is among the least-consumed peppers worldwide, and the Malagasy themselves do not eat it, according to Anderson.

Most of the world’s pepper consumption — 300,000 tons annually — is from the piper nigrum plant, similar to voatsiperifery, but native to southwestern India and heavily cultivated in Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Berries appear in many colors, like green, which are raw. Red and black peppercorn, meanwhile, gain their color from brining and fermenting, respectively. White pepper is like white rice; the darker-colored hull is removed and the white innards finely ground. And if a peppercorn is pink, it’s likely from the Brazilian peppertree or a shrub native to China.

You’ll find black, green, red and even pink peppercorns at local grocers, but probably not voatsiperifery — it’s that rare. To help build awareness of it, the Phoenix Conservancy is collaborating with select culinary entities.

Moscow’s Lodgepole restaurant has been cooking and experimenting with voatsiperifery for several years, including in its shrub-based drinks, says co-owner Melissa Barham, who notes that Lodgepole donates a portion of proceeds from these menu items to the conservancy.

“The peppercorn works wonderfully in vinaigrettes, adding a unique, floral type spice to our dressings,” says Barham, who founded the restaurant with husband and executive chef, Alex, in 2015.

“We currently season our house-made labneh with a spice blend that includes the voatsiperifery,” she says.

The Barhams are working on an event space for the restaurant, potentially launching it with an event highlighting Madagascar, as well as the conservancy’s initial focal points of the Palouse and Great Plains, Barham says.

Voatsiperifery can also be found online, including through Seattle-based World Spice Merchants, which the conservancy has also partnered with. It sells a 2-ounce portion of voatsiperifery for $14.95, also donating a portion of sales to conservation efforts. Compare that to the same quantity of the more common piper nigrum — the Vietnam variety is $6, and the same pepper from southwestern India, where it’s called tellicherry pepper, is $9.95.

Harvesting voatsiperifery could be a boon to the Malagasy, but it’s not sustainable without a holistic approach to rainforest preservation.

“Madagascar’s deforestation crisis is rooted in dire economic circumstances, so any efforts to restore rainforest must address economic issues to be successful in the long term,” Anderson says, noting that the conservancy’s goals is “pull out and hand the reins off” to Malagasy communities within 15 to 20 years.

In addition to voatsiperifery, the conservancy is directing the planting of sakua trees onto which the pepper plant’s vines can grow. Sakua nuts produce a valuable oil, and the spent hulls can be used in place of charcoal for cooking rice, the Malagasy’s primary foodstuff, thus preserving trees ordinarily used to make charcoal. And by creating firebreaks for the trees, intentional fires started by Malagasy farmers to clear grassland for cattle grazing are less likely to burn through the forest.

Combined, this incentivizes further restoration, Anderson says.

And if in the future, Malagasy stakeholders want to harvest and market voatsiperifery pepper on a large scale, a healthy and protected forest could support it. While the Malagasy may choose not to harvest the little peppercorn with the difficult-to-pronounce name, either way they’ll have entrenched processes for protecting and preserving their homelands.

“Our view is that Malagasy are the best stewards for the rainforest and it’s not our place to tell them how they should use the resources that the rainforest has,” Anderson says. ♦