Where does cardamom come from?

In 2024 Guatemala produced 76,339 tonnes, 39% of the world's 197,199 tonnes (FAOSTAT). India followed with 27%, then Indonesia (21%), Laos (4.9%) and Nepal (4.5%). The top five account for 96%, 21 countries reported output and 0.5% came from outside the top ten. World production changed +82% over the ten years to 2024 and -10% on the previous year.

These figures are broader than cardamom. FAOSTAT counts nutmeg, mace and cardamoms in a single item, and the trade heading HS 0908 does the same, so neither ranking separates the three. Guatemala's total is almost entirely green cardamom, while Indonesia's includes a large quantity of nutmeg and mace from Maluku and North Sulawesi.

Two different plants are also mixed in. Green or small cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, grows in Alta Verapaz, in the Cardamom Hills of Kerala and Tamil Nadu and in Laos. Large or black cardamom, Amomum subulatum, is a separate species grown in eastern Nepal and Sikkim, dried over smoke and used quite differently.

Guatemala was the largest exporter of cardamom (HS 0908) in 2024 with 41% of world export value, ahead of India (19%), on world trade of $1.3 billion (CEPII BACI). Saudi Arabia was the largest importer with 19%.

The Gulf is the market. Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates together took a large share of world imports in 2024, because cardamom is the defining flavor of Arabic coffee. That concentrated, culturally specific demand is why Guatemala can be the largest exporter while consuming almost none of the spice itself.

India sits on both sides of the table, exporting 19% of world value while importing 8.6%. It consumes nearly all of its own crop domestically and imports to blend and to cover shortfalls, which is the opposite of Guatemala's export-only model.

There is no futures market for cardamom and no free public benchmark price, so this site quotes none. India runs electronic auctions for small cardamom at Puttady in Kerala and Bodinayakanur in Tamil Nadu, where licensed dealers bid lot by lot, but that is a domestic price for Indian capsules rather than a world reference. Guatemalan cardamom is sold in private negotiation between exporters and Gulf importers, with trading and warehousing concentrated in Dubai.

Grade decides most of the price. Buyers pay for large, unsplit capsules that have held their green color, sorted by screen size and increasingly by optical sorters. Split capsules, off-color capsules and loose seed sell far lower, and volatile oil content matters separately for the extraction trade.

Demand concentrates in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and rises around Ramadan and the hajj, when coffee consumption and hospitality peak. Because a handful of importers cover most of that demand, their buying and their held stocks move the market more than any change in world production.

Cardamom needs regular rain through the year and dies back in drought. In Kerala, heavy monsoon rain and landslides destroy plantations outright rather than merely cutting a harvest, and replanting a hillside takes years, so weather losses in the Western Ghats persist.

Importing countries test cardamom closely, and detentions over residues can halt an origin's shipments, divert crop to domestic markets and force exporters to build testing capacity. Because the buyers are few, one authority's decision can close most of an origin's export market at once.

Capsules dried too hot or too slowly lose the green color buyers pay for. Drier capacity, fuel supply and the weather at harvest therefore set the grade mix and not just the tonnage, and a season with plenty of capsules can still be short of the top grade.

Cardamom takes about three years from planting to a full harvest, and Guatemalan area has expanded in waves after good years. Those waves arrive together, so an expansion decided in one price cycle lands in the next, which is why supply overshoots and undershoots demand.

Cardamom is a perennial herb of the ginger family that grows from rhizomes in the shade of forest trees, propagated from suckers or seedlings and giving its first full harvest about three years after planting. Flowers appear on panicles trailing along the ground, and the capsules on a panicle ripen unevenly.

Picking is done by hand in repeated rounds over several months, and the capsules are taken just short of ripeness: a fully ripe capsule splits, loses seed and loses grade. This is why cardamom is expensive to harvest even where labor is cheap.

Green capsules are washed, sometimes treated to fix the color, and dried in curing houses over indirect heat or in flue-cured driers at a controlled temperature over many hours. Dried capsules are rubbed to remove stalk remnants, cleaned, and sorted by screen size and by color. Off-grade capsules are decorticated and sold as seed, and both capsules and seed can be distilled or extracted for oil and oleoresin.

Green cardamom flavors Arabic coffee above all, and beyond the Gulf it goes into South Asian sweets, rice dishes, masalas and spiced tea, and into Nordic baking. Large cardamom, smoke-dried and quite different in flavor, is used in savory Indian and Nepali cooking and should not be read as the same product.

Cardamom oil and oleoresin are distilled and extracted for flavoring, fragrance and liqueurs. Nutmeg and mace, counted beside cardamom in the statistics, come from an unrelated tree and have their own markets. The by-products are husks left after decortication, which go to low-grade grinding, and spent distillation material used as fuel or compost.

In Guatemala, several hundred thousand smallholders in Alta Verapaz sell wet capsules to intermediaries who own driers. Because drying creates the color and therefore the grade, the drier owner captures much of the value, and the grower is paid for a raw material whose final quality he does not control.

India's chain runs from planters through licensed auctioneers into the Spices Board's electronic auctions and then to dealers and exporters, which makes the domestic price unusually visible for a spice. Guatemalan cardamom instead moves to Dubai and other hubs, where stocks are held to bridge the gap between harvests.

The chokepoints are drier capacity and fuel at harvest, residue testing and certification for Gulf and European buyers, and the exposure of the whole market to a small number of importers in two countries.