Pepper from the South Pacific

One of the problems of working in exotic corners of the globe, according to my world-traveling spouse, is finding suitable presents to pacify the stay-at-homes. After a recent set of stops on warm Pacific islands, he came back to Alaska carrying sets of small packages that he thought should do the trick: scented coconut-oil soaps, wood carvings, and Ponape Peppercorns.

He's known me a long time. He foresaw the questions, so also provided a copy of "World Class Pepper Comes From Pohnpei," an article from Pacific Magazine that had a lot to say about our most common spice.

Ironically, the islands of Micronesia (the group to which Pohnpei, once known as Ponape, belongs) first came to the attention of the outside world thanks to sailing ships seeking a better route to the spices of the Indies. Black pepper, the dried berries of the Piper niarum vine, was and is the most important of those spices. Residents of the United States now consume on average nearly four ounces each---about a billion ounces of the stuff total---every year.

Ninety percent of the world's pepper comes from only four countries---India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Malaysia. Pohnpei will never play in those big leagues; the island has 130 square miles of total area, and only 40 acres is planted in pepper.

It started late, too. The Pohnpei Agricultural Station imported 300 rooted pepper cuttings in 1960. The cuttings came from Fiji, but the plant variety originated in Malaysia's Sarawak. They were of a gourmet-quality strain, and they loved life on Pohnpei.

What pepper vines love might not seem idyllic to people. They need a lot of water---100 inches of rain a year minimum. The rain should be distributed evenly over all twelve months; they don't tolerate a dry season. Lest you think they might thrive in Ketchikan or Wrangell, they also like it hot. An equatorial heat and high humidity suits them perfectly. Pohnpei lies near 10 degrees north; it has only three totally clear days in a typical year, and no dry season.

In this virtual steambath, Pohnpei pepper vines produce excellent fruit, high in sugar content and volatile oils. Both white and black pepper grow here; they're varieties of the same kind of plant. For black pepper, the berries are picked when full grown but still green, dunked in scalding water, then baked or sun-dried until they darken to the proper color. For the milder white pepper, famers harvest fully ripe red berries. The berries sit fermenting in water for eight days, then have their red skins rubbed off. After being washed and dried, the white peppercorns are also baked or sun-dried, but only until they turn a creamy tan color.

Even in a near-perfect habitat for pepper, growing a successful crop takes time, effort, and money. Pohnpei pepper farmers start two-foot cuttings of either variety in rich soil and train the sprouting vines to grow up tree-fern logs 10 to 12 feet long. They must prune and fertilize the young plants for two or three years before they can get any harvest at all, and will have to spend about $1500 an acre on chemicals, equipment, and manure during those early years---hired hands would add more cost The plants will not produce a full crop until another five years or so have passed.

But by the time the pepper farm is in full production, the farmer can expect to net more than $6000 an acre. Incomes of that size are good news in an underdeveloped and tiny country, as are the jobs generated at the two plants processing the peppercorns for export.

Perhaps there's another specialized crop out there, something that brings in good money from small farms but is suitable for the far north...Going by Pohnpei's experience, it's worth seeking.