Travel broadens the mind, says client of Westleys FP and journalist Andrew Purvis, and talking to locals about their financial dreams and values narrows the differences between us all.

On the terrace of the Hotel Patricia, a faded French-colonial landmark in Ambanja, Madagascar, I sat with a grand café crème in hand, chatting to the export director of a nearby cocoa plantation for an article I was writing about fair trade. “How much do you earn in England?” he asked apropos of nothing, and it was unclear who was interviewing whom. He typed the amount into a currency calculator (there were no smart phones or apps back then), converted the sum and his eyes widened.

“And a director like me… how much would I earn?” The amount was several times his salary and “Mr Mamy” (full name Fiaferana Hary Mamy Razakarivony) looked a little crestfallen. “How much is a house in England?” he inquired next.

It was blunt and intrusive by British standards, but I could see where Mr Mamy was coming from. Like all businessmen, he wanted to know how well he was doing in life – but the wealth gap between Europe and the global south confounded him.

Now it was my turn to ask questions – and the answers were a wake-up call. A preparateur, or foreman, on Mr Mamy’s plantation earned 12 million Malagasy francs (about £760) a year, he told me. Though shocking, this was twice as much as the average cocoa farmer. Even today, 80 per cent of Madagascar’s population survives on less than US$2 (about £1.50) per day, according to the World Food Programme. Mr Mamy’s mission was to train more preparateurs, he said, raising quality standards and ensuring that all farmers were paid more money for their crop.

Days later, I was propping up the bar with the manager of a luxury resort on Madagascar’s west coast, accessible only by light aircraft. Its thatched villas were clustered around a pool where the towels on the loungers were pops of lime green against the fashionably matt-brown eco-architecture. The aptly named Hilton, from South Africa, had a different view to Mr Mamy’s on honouring endeavour with cash.

“When I first came here,” he said, “I thought it would be nice to reward 10 of our best employees with sunglasses, some fake Oakleys I’d picked up in Durban. It was a big mistake.” Over the next week, he explained, the rest of the staff came one by one to his office and asked for sunglasses – a request he declined. “Next, they demanded a pay rise,” he continued. “They’d bought sunglasses at a local market and spent a month’s wages on them. That’s why they needed more money.”

Hilton’s point was this: in a country where self-sufficiency is a way of life, a pay rise is not a cure, but a curse. As soon as status and value are attached to material things and behaviour is rewarded with cash, the old ways of taking only what you need from the earth and the ocean are forgotten – and an entire value system is lost.

He may be right. Call me naïve, but wherever I have travelled in the developing world, from El Salvador and Belize to Ghana, the most contented people have been in villages where children play in a sunny spot between rudimentary houses scattered across a clearing, chasing chickens and feral pigs – free-range animals they will later eat – while their parents harvest enough corn, beans or jackfruit for their own needs and those of their families.

It’s a heresy, in our guilt-ridden northern hemisphere culture, to suggest that these families live an agreeable life – but it’s better than that of their cousins in the cities. If you have food and a roof over your head, do you need a pay cheque and a shopping spree? In Hilton’s view, you don’t. As soon as mirror shades were introduced on this remote peninsula on Madagascar’s breezy western coast, its gentle philosophical people – who had hitherto fished or farmed for a living – adopted the very outlook that has arguably tainted Europe and North America. In many ways, they are less content now that they have seen how the other half lives.

On a subsequent assignment I found myself talking to a farmer on the banks of the Brazilian Amazon about the benefits of cultivating acai berries, the nutritional superfood of the moment. An American supplier had agreed to buy all the acai he and his fellow ribeirinhos (river dwellers) could grow, guaranteeing their market – and a British drinks company was paying him a Fairtrade premium of 5 per cent above the market price, plus a further bonus for quality and organic production. This was putting an estimated £300,000 a year into the riverbank community.

Rivadavia Cesar Braga, then 63, was frank about the result. “I’ve ended up with so much money, I’ve had to start investing – so I’ve bought nine head of cattle,” he said. It struck me as ironic that these were the animals which, when reared on an industrial scale, accelerated the destruction of the Amazon through deforestation.

There had been other investments, too. “I’ve been able to buy a better boat and engine,” Rivadavia told me through an interpreter, “plus a second small speedboat, a TV, an electricity generator and appliances for the house, such as a fridge freezer. We now have four cell phones for the kids. Well, the girls are teenagers after all.”

Hilton would have been horrified, but I felt reassured. No matter where you are in the world, people have the same dreams and aspirations and they are for the most part altruistic, not obscene. Rivadavia wanted a better life for his daughters than he’d had himself, as an impoverished rubber tapper who one day got lucky with acai. In Madagascar, Mr Mamy paid his foremen more so all the cocoa farmers could benefit.

Yes, there are exceptions (sometimes involving fake Oakleys) but that is the challenge of international development: how do you spread wealth equitably and give people choice without repeating the mistakes and excesses of the developed world? Answers on a postcard, please… from wherever you choose to travel next.

Andrew Purvis is a freelance journalist. He is a client of Westley’s Financial Planning and writes this as a guest blog.