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Women Run Afghanistan’s Saffron Farms. This Season, Some Are Too Scared to Work.

A saffron supplier rushes to aid evacuees while keeping an eye on the situation back home

By Stephanie Ganz
Eater
Sep 30, 2021

Excerpt:

“That’s been devastating, knowing that female farmers and laborers can’t come back in the fields and do the work they’ve been doing with pride for years,” Ghaffer says. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. Saffron harvest is going to happen soon in Afghanistan, but the people there are living with a lack of clarity.”

Harvesting saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, is an extremely labor-intensive process. Farmers must work in the fields before dawn to hand-pick the purple crocus flowers before the sun can damage their fragile blooms. Ghaffer picked the name Moonflowers as an homage to that predawn process. Each stigma — the pollen-germinating piece, of which there are three per plant — must be removed by hand, one at a time. Each flower lives for a short 48 hours, so the harvesting period is brief and urgent. It takes upward of 70,000 flowers to yield just one pound of the spice, which can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 on the retail market.

Assessing the quality of saffron is all about using the senses; the color and overall appearance, aroma, and flavor are all factors. Two types of saffron stigmas — super negin and sargol — can produce premium saffron. Super negin stigmas are longer in length and lack yellow ends or crumbs. Over the past few years, Afghan saffron has been ranked the best in the world by the International Taste and Quality Institute in Brussels.

In Afghanistan, though the farms are family-owned, women reportedly perform 80 percent of the processing, including caring for the flowers and harvesting saffron. “Buying saffron from Afghanistan empowers the women there,” Ghaffer says. “It’s very rare for women in rural areas to have access to the labor market to make their own income.”

Read the complete article here.