Cardamon Project

By day the snow covered Himalayas pierce the clouds, while the jungled foothills stretch hundreds of miles down to the plains. At night the mountains come alive with the lights of thousands of homes, mirroring the stars above, and that is when you realise just how many people live in this forgotten corner of the planet.

The land is green with crops of every kind; sugar cane, cauliflowers, bamboo, rice, ginger, corn, wheat and, of course, every shady gorge is filled with the dark green leaves of cardamom plants. The Nepalese work themselves and the land hard in between monsoon flooding and the cold of winter. The fields are ploughed using buffalo and the children walk for hours each day up and down the precipitous slopes just for a basic education. Yet they have an awareness and appreciation of the wider world, which, partly because of the heavy presence of the Maoist rebels in recent years, has not been reciprocated. But through the dedication and the skill of the Mercy Corps staff and the community leaders this is slowly changing.

Around the town of Phidim, in the eastern Highlands, Mercy Corps works with the farmers to develop better communication with their market, improve the quality of the crop, bring processing closer to the point of production and improve the techniques used to increase economic benefits of the crop. The cardamom was previously dried over an open fire, which needed lots of firewood and added a smoky flavour to the spice. The new convection drier is much more fuel efficient and leaves the cool, aromatic flavour of the pink cardamom crop clear to taste. Interestingly, the new drier required parts no more complicated than a couple of large, metal barrels to contain the fire and a metal mesh to lay the cardamom out on. It is really the communication of ideas, both technology and business practises, that is having the most impact.

Meanwhile, down on the plains of the Eastern Terai, Mercy Corps are working with the I-NCEA, a community organization they support in Birtamode, to organise and standardize the cardamom export industry. The main challenge is to amass enough good quality cardamom to trade on the international market, but with such a fantastic team of people working together in Nepal and with support from all the fundraisers over here I feel positive that all difficulties will be overcome.

Mercy Corps' focus in Nepal is very much on empowering the communities to make a better quality of life for themselves, specifically in this project by increasing the competitiveness of their product and the price it fetches. However, co-ordinating support at various points as the crop is grown, processed, sold, packaged and transported is a model of aid work that could be applied to many industries in developing countries. Hopefully, the success of this project will not only improve the lives of the wonderful, welcoming people we were privileged enough to meet, but also be an example of how in the future others in similar situations can be helped.