What do a Starbuck’s café in New York, an Iranian spice merchant in Dubai, and a small peasant farmer in Uganda have in common? The answer is a small green aromatic spice pod called cardamom.

Long cherished in much of Asia for its unique flavour and scent, with much of the Asian trade dominated by Iran’s shrewd merchants, cardamom — the “queen of spices” — is now making further inroads: in American coffee houses as an exotic addition for western palates, and in Ugandan fields as a new and promising crop to grow.

Cardamom has been grown for generations in its native southern India. The south Indian state of Kerala, in particular, with its famed Malabar spice trade, has down the centuries been the source of the world’s best cardamom, supplying the rest of the subcontinent by land, southeast Asia by sea, and Arabia, the Middle East, and eastern Africa both by the sea-going dhows and the camel trains of Arab spice caravans. Even today, Kerala and its surrounding regions remain the world’s primary produc-tion centre for cardamom.

But the appeal of cardamom has spread well beyond the shores of the Arabian Sea. Traditional Indian cuisine of course, continues to prize cardamom as a flavouring agent in many dishes: the spice is a vital component of the garam masala on which many curries are based, and it is also widely used in beverages, ice-creams, and traditional sweets. In the Middle East as well, cardamom is common, with consumption steadily increasing. More recently, with the spread of Asian foods around the world, the flavour has become more familiar to the west: the introduction by Starbuck’s of cardamom-flavoured chai teas bears testimony to its increasing popularity, but cardamom based liqueurs and sweets are also becoming more popular in western markets, and in northern Europe, cardamom is commonly used as a flavouring in baked goods.

With this large and growing market, production has also become more wide-spread. Southern India remains the world’s largest producing region, but because of India’s own high levels of demand, most of its production is consumed domestically. The second-largest region of production is in Central America: Guatemala is a newcomer on the cardamom scene, but, within a short period of about 15 years, it has dramatically increased both its quantity and quality of production to become the world’s largest cardamom exporter. Much of the cardamom that changes hands in Teheran, Dubai, and other market centres comes from Guatemala.

What is perhaps unique about the production of cardamom is the positive development effects that it can have in the producing regions. In Kerala, for example, cardamom is produced almost exclusively by small farmers, with plots averaging about 1 hectare of land. Since the crop is relatively easy to process, many such farmers, despite their small scale, are able to set up small processing centres and process their own crop, which enables them to add value and earn a higher income. The state of Kerala runs agricultural support services and marketing boards, thereby helping farmers both with technical support and with market access. In the state’s predominantly agricultural economy, this type of production model for cardamom (as well as for numerous other crops, including pepper, cinammon, nutmeg and other spices) has been a resounding success: it has been responsible for helping Kerala to achieve the levels of income, income-equality, landdistribution, female-participation in the work force, and literacy for which the state is rightly renowned.

The model in Guatemala has been rather different. State involvement has been less active, particularly in the arena of marketing. Nevertheless, the fact that the country could become the world’s largest exporter of cardamom within a time-frame of about 15 years is a testimonial to success. Again, many smaller farmers are able to process their crop, and many indeed have become small exporters in their own right. The Iranian merchant trading in cardamom in the Middle East will likely deal with numerous small Guatemalan suppliers, indicating that the benefits of the industry in Guatemala are quite wide-spread. In Uganda, the situation is again different. There is both a short-term and a long-term impetus for the development of cardamom as a new crop for the country. In the long term, the experience of Guatemala, and the growing market for cardamom, provide both inspiration and guidance for Uganda to achieve a high level of success in becoming a sustainable production centre for cardamom. Uganda also has certain unique advantages that bode well: an agricultural economy blessed with fertile and unspoiled soils, ideal rainfall and climate, and numerous industrious, productive small farmers. Above all, both the natural and agricultural profile of the country tend to favour crops, like cardamom, that do well in shaded, humid, rainforest-like environments. Indeed, it is becoming apparent that cardamom grows more quickly, and more productively, in many parts of Uganda than it does in its native southern India! Just as the growing of vanilla found a natural “fit” with the Ugandan landscape, the growing of cardamom will, too.

Indeed, vanilla is behind the short-term impetus for the adoption of cardamom in Uganda. Over the past half-decade, vanilla grew to become an important income-earner for Uganda’s small farmers, and an important export-earner for the country. The crop was widely introduced to small farmers less than a decade ago by private companies and donor organisations, and it was discovered quite quickly that Uganda, with its natural assets and hardworking people, had the capacity to produce some of the best-quality vanilla in the world. As vanilla prices peaked in 2002 and 2003, the crop’s high value led to more than a five-fold increase in export volumes — and on the ground, in the producing regions, this meant a large injection of cash and prosperity to the small peasant farmers who formed the foundation of the crop’s success.

In 2004, the prices of vanilla have decreased dramatically; a small Ugandan farmer can now expect to earn about 10% of what he or she would have earned last year from the crop. The remedy, to try and sustain rural incomes, is to diversify. And the average small farmer’s vanilla field — humid, shaded, fertile, and carefully tended — is perfect for cardamom. Cardamom can be inter-planted with vanilla (or with coffee, bananas, and other traditional Ugandan crops). Easy to grow, it can in due course provide an additional source of income, and if the farmer processes his own crop, then the additional income can be quite substantial.

Given the potential of cardamom to contribute to Uganda’s rural development, the crop is receiving a great deal of attention in the country, especially in the wake of the collapse in vanilla prices. Certain donors (particularly “APEP” — the Agricultural Productivity Enhancement Project, funded by the US Agency for International Development) have teamed up with a private-sector partner, Uganda Crop Industries Limited, to introduce cardamom to Ugandan farmers. The resulting cardamom project aims to provide farmers with the necessary planting materials, training, distribution, and market channels. The program will create in Uganda a whole new agricultural industry in cardamom, covering all aspects from research and development in plant varieties, training and support to farmers, processing at the small farmer level, and up to harvest, packaging and export.

Begun in early 2004, the cardamom programme is an ambitious one, involving 1500 to 2000 small farmers in various parts of the country, and aiming to export significant volumes by 2007. The early results have already proven to be most promising, and it would not be unreasonable to expect that Uganda will, in a few years, be providing some of the world’s best cardamom to the Iranian merchants of the Middle East and the coffee tables of New York cafés.