Spice Trade 3.0: Exploring the Modern Spice Trade in Vietnam's Northern Frontier

摘要

throughout its long history, including the antiquities (what we are calling Spice Trade 1.0) and the colonial era (Spice Trade 2.0), the spice trade story has shaped land, politics, and societies, and captured imaginations around the globe. But the spice trade is not simply something of the past. The contemporary trade —Spice Trade 3.0—has significant geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic imprints and impacts. In Vietnam's northern frontier, on the border with China, numerous life stories and livelihoods are being shaped by the production, processing, and sale of three particular spices—black cardamom, cinnamon, and star anise. Our broad research project follows these spices along their trade routes, from seedlings in remote fields on both sides of the border, to their wholesaling and shipment to world markets, and their final consumption. This work is underpinned by debates from political ecology, livelihoods literature, and commodity chain analyses, and draws on ethnographic field-work spanning the past twenty years in these uplands. In this brief piece, we focus on the voices and livelihood concerns of the spice cultivators at the start of these commodity chains in Vietnam's uplands. Why these three spices in particular? Because they not only are increasingly shaping upland livelihoods for thousands of ethnic minority cultivators in the region but are also considered essential ingredients for Vietnam's ubiquitous breakfast soup, pha.