Black pepper

Abstract

Farmers in Central Viet Nam are learning how black pepper can help their agroforests and homegardens be more resilient to climate change. Quite rarely do we enter a restaurant that doesn’t have a black-pepper grinder on the table. A pinch of black pepper is added to almost every type of recipe imaginable. Black pepper (Piper nigrum), native to South and Southeast Asia, is one of the world’s most traded spices. It is presently largely cultivated in India, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Viet Nam and China. Of the 473,000 tonnes produced in 2013, one-third came from Vietnam, a top exporter for over a decade, growing approximately 97,600 hectares of the plant in 2015