30 May 2018
The Pentland Centre’s Associate Director of Engagement, Benjamin Neimark, recently visited Nestlé headquarters to meet with their Sustainability Officer, Hannah Jagger, and to disseminate his current research on high-value commodity networks.

Benjamin has been exploring new ways to map power relations working closely with smallholder vanilla farmers in Madagascar. Madagascar’s 100,000 vanilla farmers produce roughly 80 percent of the world’s supply of natural vanilla.

His work, which was funded by an N8 – Agrifood Challenges award and a Lancaster University Faculty of Science and Technology Impact Award, follows the current vanilla price spike all the way up the commodity chain to large suppliers and multinational food companies.

Ben has been interviewed about this work for The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.