Black pepper (Piper nigrum L.) belongs to botanical family Piperaceae, native to Western Ghats of India and popularly called ‘Black gold’ and ‘King of Spices’ is an important commodity of trade along the erstwhile “Spice route”. In ancient times it was sourced by the Arabs and sold to the Europeans and subsequently the Europeans themselves found out the production centres and they also spread the crop across the globe, presently it is cultivated in more than 25 countries in Asia, Africa and South America. Area, production and export of important countries are given in Table 1,Out of 0.525 million ha, 41.4 % of the global area under pepper is in India with a production share of 17.9%, Vietnam share to global production and export is the maximum, 28.9% and 40.0%, respectively. On an average 70.1% of the global production is exported, comparatively share of export to production is less from Madagascar(10.6%), China, P.R. (18.1%), India (37.6%), Thailand (45.7%) and remaining all countries are sharing above 50.0%(Table 1). During 2013-13, India exported 15,363 tonnes of pepper to the value of Rs. 63,810.29 Lakhs to lore than30 countries.

Type: Journal Article
Year: 2014
URL: https://openjournals.neu.edu/aes/journal/article/view/v7art9