Tiny Indonesian Island Is Top Producer : Nutmeg Industry Sprinkled With Small Farms

Next time you sprinkle some nutmeg, spare a thought for the volcano-harassed farmers of Siau Island.

The islanders plant their nutmeg trees on the fertile slopes of the Karangetang volcano and hope it doesn’t erupt before harvest time. When Karangetang exploded late last year, it poured lava and ash into the nutmeg orchards and forced the farmers to flee their villages and sleep in tents on the beach.

It also sent a wave of concern around the world as nervous spice traders gauged the eruption’s impact on the world nutmeg market.

Tiny Siau Island, 56 miles off the northern tip of Sulawesi, is the world’s biggest producer of nutmeg in the biggest producer nation, Indonesia.

The Indonesian archipelago, much of which was once known as the Spice Islands, is also a leading source of ginger, cinnamon, pepper, sesame seed, turmeric and vanilla, and it grows about two-thirds of the world’s cloves.

According to a U.S. report--ordered after the 1983 U.S.-led invasion of the second largest nutmeg producer, Grenada--97% of Indonesia’s nutmeg farmers are small holders tending just a few trees. Most “operate on the very edge of subsistence,” the study found.

It is a system unlikely to change in the near future.

“As long as the price doesn’t go up dramatically, there is no incentive to mechanize the industry or switch to a plantation system,” said a spice-trade analyst.

The leafy, evergreen nutmeg trees grow about 50 feet tall and begin bearing fruit resembling apricots seven years after planting. The fruit’s fleshy, yellow meat is soaked in sugar and sold as candy in much of Indonesia.

The farmers remove the bright scarlet membrane that surrounds the nutmeg seeds, which is ground to make mace. They dry the seeds in the sun for a month, then crack the shells with wooden mallets.

Family members, or sometimes contract laborers earning about $1.50 a day, sort the fragrant nutmeg from the shells. The raw nutmeg and mace are transported to Manado, the capital of northern Sulawesi, then to Singapore and on to the big importers--the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.

For all their efforts, the nutmeg farmers receive about 36 cents a pound for nutmeg and about $2.72 a pound for mace.

It was not always so. The exotic spices of the East Indies were literally worth their weight in gold during the Middle Ages, when Arab merchants jealously guarded the secret routes to the remote spice markets of Asia.

In 14th-Century Europe, a pound of nutmeg was worth seven oxen. Peppercorns were accepted as legal tender. Cinnamon, cloves and other spices were used to flavor wine.

Early doctors used spices in medicinal concoctions, including masks designed to ward off the plague.

According to a report in 1609 by a Portugese explorer, nutmeg and mace could “cure all distempers in the nerves, and aches caused by cold . . . or correct stinking breath, clear the eyes, comfort the stomach, liver and spleen, and digest meat. They are a remedy against many other distempers and serve to add outward luster to the face.”

Because of that value, early nutmeg farmers were not left to cultivate their spices in peace. The Portuguese and Spanish seafarers who explored the Indonesia archipelago were replaced in the 17th Century by the Dutch, whose shrewd business practices and ruthless exploitation monopolized the islands’ nutmeg, mace and clove production; Sri Lankan cinnamon, and Indian pepper, ginger and turmeric.