cardamom

Western Ghats, India (true/green cardamom); black cardamom from Nepal/Bhutan highlands

Ancient Indian Ocean trade, Arab coffee culture, Scandinavian import through early medieval trade routes, then Guatemala from 1914, where a German coffee planter introduced Kerala seed and Q'eqchi' Maya smallholders now grow most of the world's supply

Guatemala is the world's largest cardamom producer, and the record is specific down to the field: in 1914 the German planter Oscar Majus Kloeffer put Kerala seed into the finca Chinasayub at Cobán, in Alta Verapaz. By the 1970s Guatemala had displaced India's export lead and it has led production since 2000. The spice that belongs to Indian Ocean trade and Arab coffee culture is now mostly Central American. The part usually left out is who grows it: roughly 350,000 small producers in Alta Verapaz account for about seventy percent of the national crop, the great majority of them Q'eqchi'. A German planter moved an Indian crop onto Q'eqchi' land, and neither the Indian origin nor the Q'eqchi' labour appears anywhere on the jar. This is what colonial agricultural transfer looks like when it works: uprooted from one context, replanted in a second, and made to produce for a third.