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Regenerative farming may help preserve the “Queen of Spices.”
Your spice drawer is no stranger to the impacts of climate change. One of the most affected is the minty-spicy star of chai, kheer, Swedish buns, and so much more: cardamom.
In the largest two cardamom-producing countries, India and Guatemala, the spice has faced withering drought and intensifying extreme weather, making it scarcer and more expensive. So what’s in store for this mainstay of sweet and savory dishes alike? And can the “Queen of Spices” be climate-proofed?
The cardamom I sprinkle into the dough to make Cardamom Snap Cookies comes from the ground-up, dried fruits of the perennial green cardamom plant, which is native to the Western Ghats mountain range of southern India and thrives there and in other tropical and subtropical climes.
Rather like vanilla, cardamom is produced on a relatively small scale globally, largely by smallholder farmers. It’s the third-most expensive spice in the world, after saffron and vanilla, and the industry is marked by big price swings. And that’s before you factor in climate change as a threat multiplier.
In 2020, a duo of powerful hurricanes swept through the hilly, cardamom-producing region of Guatemala, which is the world’s biggest exporter, deluging fields. The harvest that year was negatively impacted, though the effects paled in comparison to those of extreme heat in 2023 and drought in 2024, according to Elisa Aragon, co-founder of the Guatemala-based ingredients company Nelixia, which sells cardamom. The heat and drought halted flower development on cardamom plants, and combined with damage by pests to cut production by nearly half for the current season.
Those impacts over the last two years have tripled Guatemalan cardamom prices, Elisa says, and are the first time that “the crisis of prices is because of climate change.” She added that Nelixia had to increase its cardamom prices, which kept some of their usual customers from buying.
Indian cardamom has also felt the heat. Sana Javeri Kadri, the founder and CEO of the single-origin spice company Diaspora Co., says that “cardamom has been my problem child for a long time,” because of a succession of climate impacts at the three regenerative farms from which the company sources. After yields at their first partner farm in Kerala declined because of heat and unseasonal rain, Diaspora Co. began sourcing from a farm in Tamil Nadu, but then flash floods hit the Tamil Nadu farm two years ago, cratering two years of harvests. Last spring, the company added a third farm in the region into the mix; but so far, the combined climate impacts have kept Diaspora Co. from having as much cardamom as it had expected.
These are industry-wide problems in India. Last year, a historic drought hit Kerala, where 60% of the country’s cardamom is grown, halving production in the state.
Across the world, farmers and researchers are employing a range of methods to try to protect cardamom from extreme weather.
Across the world, farmers and researchers are employing a range of methods to try to protect cardamom from extreme weather. Last year, the Indian Spices board, a government group, released a drought-tolerant variety for farmers to begin growing. Sana says, “It could be incredibly helpful long-term,” though she estimates it’ll take a decade or more before it’s adopted widely.
In the meantime, farmers are coming up with their own adaptive measures. Elisa says in Guatemala, planting cardamom at higher elevations to escape rising temperatures is one element of an ongoing “evolution in how to handle the crop.” Another is the use of regenerative farming practices such as agroforestry, which can offer resilience against drought, heat, and floods. Nelixia has been supporting a transition to regenerative techniques for five years at some of the farms it sources from, and last year’s drought cut the cardamom harvest there by a relatively spare 30%, compared to 80% at neighboring monoculture farms, she says.
Similar trends have played out at the regenerative farms Diaspora Co. works with. When last year’s drought in Kerala hit Abraham Chacko’s farm, he lost just a fifth of his cardamom harvest, compared to larger losses at other conventional farms in the region, and almost all of his plants survived. His farm mimics a natural forest by incorporating layers of plants around the cardamom, and is planted with a variety of the spice that he bred from the hardiest seedlings for pest resistance and an ambrosial aroma reminiscent of licorice, mint, pine, and pomelo. After the drought last year, he wrote in a message, it was clear that his variety “proved to be climate-resilient, too.”
Regenerative farming methods can blunt the effects of warming on chai’s linchpin spice, but their use in the cardamom industry today is still the exception rather than the rule. Elisa says the companies involved in the cardamom supply chain between the farm and the grocery store — small ones, like hers, and big buyers of ingredients — need to help finance the transition. When that happens, she says, “the value of creating this resilience is going to be divided by everyone.”
