Most of the world's Cardamom comes from this Central American nation, where one intrepid farmer is shaking up the way it's grown and traded for the better.
Before we can see the cardamom plants, Amilcar Pereira and his men have to castrate the bulls. That morning, in a pickup truck on the bumpy mountain climb to the cloud forests of Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz, I was privy to Pereira the theologian. Our discussion about his new export company, 786 Gexsa, prompted a half-hour sermon on the roles of god and personal responsibility in family and commerce. He named his first business FedeAgro, a portmanteau of the Spanish words for faith and agriculture.
Frisch was drawn to Pereira, he tells me, because in all his travels around Guatemala in search of suppliers, Pereira and his partner, Francisco Lavignino, are the only exporters who also grow and process their own pods from start to finish. Frisch is now their sole American importer. Other industry insiders confirm that they run the country’s only vertically integrated cardamom business.
Almost all of the cardamom farms in Alta Verapaz are minuscule operations run by Guatemalans of Mayan heritage, some as small as individual plots worked by families one poor harvest from destitution. Once these smallholder farmers pick the fresh pods, they have fewer than 12 hours to offload the harvest before it begins to rot.
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