Where Does Cinnamon Come From?

Farmer transporting cinnamon near Tanjung Kasri

Cinnamon has been used through the ages for all sorts of things rangingg from embalming to meat preservation.  Now when most people think of cinnamon they imagine the delicious powder that you add to bearclaws and sambuca.  But there are actually a lot of varieties of cinnamon.  The cinnamon you sprinkle on your oatmeal actually comes from a tree, Cinnamomum verum, which is native to Sri Lanka.  This type of cinnamon was first described in Chinese writings dating back almost 5,000 years and was one of the spices that drove European colonization of South and Southeast Asia.  Though Sri Lanka is still the major exporter of this type of cinnamon, another variety, known commonly as Cassia or Cassiavera (Cinnamomum aromaticum) has a wider range, naturally growing from India to Vietnam.

Chart from Mongabay.

Cassia and other varieties of cinnamon are also used in food, but the principal uses are for pharmaceutical products and cosmetics.  Indonesia is the world's leading exporter all types of cinnamon, but the main kind produced here is Cinnamomum burmanii, which is sometimes considered "inferior" to the kind produced in Sri Lanka.  One of the hotbeds of cinnamon production in the archipelago is Kerinci Valley (where I live), which accounts for 40-60% of all cinnamon produced in Indonesia, depending on the year.  The cinnamon produced here also comes from the outer part of a tree, and when you cruise around the valley you will see signs of cinnamon production, as farmers lay out kulit manis (sweet skin) along the side of the road to dry.  If you go into the National Park you usually have to walk through a fairly large area of kayu manis (sweet wood) groves before you get to the real forest.  The Kerinci Valley is ideally suited for cinnamon production, as the tree prefers altitudes ranging from 500-1500 meters and annual precipitation of 2,000-3,000 millimeters.  The cinnamon produced here is exported to be used in drugs and make-up, and traditionally the US has been the largest market.

Cinnamomum aromaticum drawing from
Wikipedia.

Kayu manis first came here in the 1920s.  The Kerinci Valley, due to its inaccessibility, was one of the last places to fall under the domination of the Dutch colonial authorities.  But when they finally overcame local resistance (1903) to their rule, they quickly recognized the potential of the region, which for centuries had grown surpluses of rice.  The rich volcanic soils and abundant rainfall make the area ideal for agricultural production, but the isolated location in the middle of the Bukit Barisan mountains makes it hard to market products outside the region.  In 1922 the Dutch built a road through the mountains to link the area to Padang, which transformed the agricultural economy of the area.  Before this time most of the farmers grew wet and dry rice for subsistence, but the new road opened the area to the cash economy based on commodities.  Many upland fields (ladang) were given over to tree crop cultivation, and deforestation increased as farmers opened up more fields.  Kayu manis was one of the crops that drove the transformation, and fluctuations in the price of cinnamon have caused waves of deforestation and planting here.

Steps in Cinnamon Production

The first step in making cinnamon is to grow the tree.  The bark can be harvested after 5 years, and the price depends on where on the tree the bark comes from and how old the tree is.  The best bark comes from trees that are between 20-30 years old; trees of this age will yield between 80-100 kilograms of good bark, whereas a tree 6-8 years old yields 15-25 kilograms of lower quality bark.  Thus as you can imagine, kulit manis is a convenient crop because it allows the farmers to wait until the price is most favorable to sell.  In addition, since it is a tree crop it has the benefit of carbon sequestration while it is growing.  Many agroforestry projects promote cassaviera cultivation because of this.  On the other hand there is no day-to-day payoff, and you can't eat kayu manis.  So farmers growing cinnamon generally need another source of income while they are waiting for their trees to grow or for the price to go up.  Many farmers work as laborers, or they may grow wet or dry rice on other land for food.  Some farmers have home-based businesses as well.  In the picture to the left you can see a tree that has had the lower bark (the most valuable) removed; this kills the tree.  Sometimes farmers cut limbs off the trees, which allows the tree to keep growing, but the kulit manis from the branches isn't as valuable as that from the trunk.

After the outermost layer of the tree is removed a special tool is used to remove the bark.  In the picture to the right you can see a husband-wife team of farmers shaving bark near Tanjung Kasri in Serampas, where kayu manis is one of the main crops because it doesn't spoil on the long road to the market.  Like pretty much all commodities, the price of kulit manis fluctuates widely, but currently it fetches around 3,000 rupiah (approximately US$.35) per kilogram.  The next step is to dry the kulit manis.  This takes about 2-4 days, depending on the weather.  As it dries it curls up on itself.

In most places, after drying the kayu manis has to be transported to the market.  There are two basic patterns here.  In some places relatively close to the market a middleman comes to the village to buy the kayu manis directly from the farmers.  The middleman then uses a truck to transport the kayu manis to a market town or a city and sells it to a wholesaler.  In other more out of the way places the farmers have to transport the kayu manis themselves to the middleman.  Cinnamon is a pretty big industry, but the farmers only get between 10-15% of the money.  The rest goes to middlemen and processing industries.

So that's the story on cinnamon.  Next time you're in the market you can think about the spice's long history and the long journey it makes to your kitchen cabinet.

References and Further Reading


Some of the background for this post comes from Sylvia Werner's excellent PhD dissertation which studied the agroforestry of the Kerinci Valley.

Werner, Sylvia.  2001.  Environmental Knowledge and Resource Management: Sumatra's Kerinci-Seblat National Park.  PhD dissertation, University of Berlin.