Lychee Season

The lychee (or litchi) is a small tree fruit that can mostly be found in the United States in canned form at Asian restaurants. Here on the east coast of Madagascar the lychee is one of the main cash crops and lychee season is pretty much the only time of year anyone has any money. It is the time of year when people repair their houses and buy new clothes for their children, maybe invest in new livestock or buy farm tools they have been needing for a while. It is also right before Christmas and the New Year allowing the Malagasy people to celebrate in style.

I can not imagine the quantity of lychees that are harvested across the country but in a normal year the port in my small village exports 30 tons (60,000lbs) of lychees a day for about two weeks. And this is only one small village in a huge region. The majority of the lychees harvested in Anivorano will be bought by exporters in Tamatave and sent to Europe, there is also a large national market with thousands of pounds being sold around the country and also turned into jams and preserves.

Lychee trees are a large and long term investment. They are complicated to cultivate and typically will not produce fruit for the first ten years. A lychee tree cannot be grown from seed as the lychees that are produced by that tree will be nothing like the lychees of the parent tree and will most likely not be marketable. The cultivation of lychee trees involves a complicated grafting process that I will not even attempt to explain without pictures, and well I am not talented enough to draw the required pictures.

Once a farmer has made the investment in the actual lychee tree there is the additional investment involved in harvesting the lychees and transporting them to market. When lychees are harvested they are put in large 30 kilo baskets called Garabas. Depending on the size and age of the tree you can get quite a few garaba from one tree. If a farmer has many trees they will employ others to harvest their lychees for them. The workers are paid per garaba, 1,000 ary (approximately $0.50) to harvest and then there is the additional cost of transportation all depending on the distance of the lychee tree to the closest market. In the past couple of years at the hight of lychee season when the market was flooded a garaba was being sold for about 5,000 ary ($2.50). This year the bottom fell out of the lychee market and garabas were being bought for about 2,000 ary ($1) thus making it completely unprofitable.

As the prices dropped many farmers stopped harvesting their lychees as they lost money, the lychees continued to ripen and then rot on the trees and the entire east cost of Madagascar is worse of then it was a couple of months ago. I am still waiting to see what the consequences of the ruined harvest will be, but I am guessing we will starting seeing more children dropping out of school, increased malnutrition and the lose of any small luxury that they might have once had.