Zanzibar Farmers Selling Clove Trees for Firewood

Intensely fragrant and flavored, cloves were the riches that drew the dhows and clippers of the colonial era to Zanzibar, giving the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago economic influence and resonance far beyond its size.

Once upon a time, the wizened, never-opened buds of the stunted evergreens were worth more than their weight in gold. European powers went to war over them in the 17th century; Zanzibari rulers made smuggling them punishable by death.

Zanzibar’s cloves have lost neither their pungent odor nor their reputation on the world market. But Zanzibar has lost the influence they brought as well as its position as the spice’s leading producer.

Many people blame low prices paid by the Zanzibar State Trading Corp. spice monopoly, which farmers increasingly are finding make it more profitable to chop down clove trees to sell as firewood.

“It doesn’t pay to grow cloves anymore,” Rashidi Nassor said as he spread out half-inch, nail-shaped clove buds to dry on a mat in the sun on Pemba, one of the two main islands of Zanzibar.

By law, Nassor and other farmers can sell their cloves only to the spice monopoly run by the government of Zanzibar, which is a semi-autonomous region of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Currently, that means they receive the equivalent of 34 cents a pound for a spice that sells for $1.70 a pound on the world market.

Fires believed set as a protest against the monopoly destroyed countless trees in the past, before the government cracked down on the suspected arsons.

But fires set to clear land for cultivation of other crops are still destroying thousands of the trees.

That means a crisis--not just now, but for years in the future. Seedlings take five to eight years to produce buds for harvest and years more to produce significant yields.

Few on Pemba, the main island for growing cloves, are planting seedlings. Many existing clove trees are more than 70 years old.

Still, in Pemba’s lush countryside, there are no simple alternatives to clove farming. That’s why farmers like Mwantumu Jecha still risk life and limb climbing the trees to break off branches bearing bunches of clove buds at their tips.

Her children, 6-year-old Ali and 5-year-old Ame, pick the spices off the fallen branches as their mother clambers up tree after tree.

Much of the harvest will end up being smuggled to the African mainland from where it will be exported for use in cooking, medicines, cosmetics--and the clove cigarettes beloved by Indonesians, the world’s biggest buyers of cloves.

In neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, cloves fetch more than twice the price offered by the Zanzibar government monopoly, Nassor said. But little of the profit from the smuggled cloves reaches the growers.

The Zanzibar State Trading Corp. resists calls to increase prices paid to farmers or to let the farmers seek their own prices in a free market.

“Cloves are the one agriculture product contributing the most to the government budget, and one of the leading foreign currency earners for Zanzibar,” said Issa Salim Machano, deputy permanent secretary of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Markets.

The government would find it very hard to give up its profits, Machano said.

Zanzibar’s political opposition is making clove prices an issue ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections set for Oct. 29.

“We are pushing for liberalization of clove marketing for the interest of farmers and revival of the crop,” said Seif Shariff Hamad, the Civic United Front’s candidate for the Zanzibari presidency.

In recent years, international clove prices have picked up from the lows of $750 a ton to about $4,000. The rise has come mainly from the late 1990s breakup of Indonesia’s clove monopoly, which had been in the hands of a son of that country’s longtime leader, President Suharto.

Indonesia is the leading grower, importer and consumer of cloves and produces between 60,000 and 80,000 tons a year.

But it is the Zanzibar cloves that are in great demand, said Lara Henwood, a South African clove trader.

“The cloves have a very strong aroma, and the majority of the flower buds are large and intact, making them among the best in the world,” she said.