Cardamom’s Global Trade Runs Through Guatemala and India — Not Tanzania

Anyone searching for “cardamom price” will land, almost without exception, on data about Guatemala and India. That is not an oversight of coverage — it reflects where the overwhelming majority of the world’s cardamom actually moves. This is a guide to that global picture, offered explicitly as background, not as a stand-in for data on Tanzania, whose own cardamom trade sits at a scale this article’s figures do not describe.

Two different spices share one name

“Cardamom” in global trade splits into two commercially distinct products that are frequently confused. Green cardamom comes from Elettaria cardamomum, has small, light-green pods, and carries a sweet, pungent, almost eucalyptus-like flavor — it is the cardamom used in masala chai and most Indian sweet and savory cooking, and it is what Guatemala and southern India grow. Black cardamom comes from an entirely different genus, Amomum subulatum, native to the Himalayan belt across Nepal, India and parts of China; its larger, dark-brown pods are harvested ripe and dried over open wood fires, a process that imparts a smoky, resinous character entirely unlike green cardamom’s. The two are not interchangeable in cooking, are priced very differently, and — this matters for sourcing — are grown in almost entirely different countries. Tanzania’s cardamom, discussed elsewhere, is the green Elettaria type, putting it nominally in the same category as the Guatemala/India trade, though at a scale that isn’t remotely comparable.

Guatemala: the volume leader, currently under strain

Guatemala is the world’s largest cardamom exporter by volume, and by a wide margin: in 2024 it shipped roughly 28,321 tonnes of cardamom worth about US$496.6 million, according to trade-data platform Tridge. That dominance has come under real pressure recently — industry reporting on the 2024/25 harvest describes Guatemalan production estimates falling by something like 40 to 50 percent, driven by poor harvest conditions and pest pressure, a shortfall significant enough to visibly tighten global supply and lift international prices.

India: smaller volume, higher-value exports

India ranks a clear second in the global export trade, shipping around 8.49 million kilograms worth roughly US$194.2 million in 2024 — well behind Guatemala on volume, but occupying the premium end of the market and serving as both a major producer and a major consuming market in its own right. Guatemala’s 2024/25 production shortfall has, if anything, worked in India’s favor, creating room for Indian exporters to capture demand ahead of peak seasonal buying periods such as Ramadan.

What unit prices actually look like — and their limits

Trade-data aggregators tracking cardamom transaction prices for March 2026 recorded a wide spread by origin: Germany around $39.90/kg, Mexico around $32.65/kg, India around $25.79/kg, and Guatemala around $14.98/kg. These are unit values calculated from recorded trade transactions, not a single global spot price — cardamom, unlike major softs such as coffee or cocoa, has no centralized futures exchange setting one reference price, so quoted figures vary by origin, grade, buyer relationship and reporting platform. Treat any single number as directional rather than a benchmark to trade against.

Where Tanzania sits in this picture

It doesn’t, in any meaningful volume sense. Tanzania does not appear among the top ten cardamom exporters tracked by major trade platforms, and its recorded annual export value — in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years — is a rounding error next to Guatemala’s roughly half-billion-dollar trade. That is worth stating plainly precisely because global cardamom price data is so easy to find and Tanzania-specific data is so hard to find: the two should never be substituted for one another. A Guatemalan or Indian cardamom price says nothing reliable about what a Tanzanian grower is paid, what a Tanzanian exporter charges, or how large Tanzania’s crop actually is this season.