AHC - Boost production of Saffron spice outside of Iran

No idea if the following requires a pre-1900 POD or few though interested to know whether it would be possible to further boost the production of Saffron spice outside of Iran, which currently accounts for around 90–93 percent of recent annual world production and thereby dominates the export market on a by-quantity basis IOTL?

India, Spain, Greece, Afghanistan and a few others like China are the only other notable producers of Saffron IOTL though interested to see which countries with the right PODs have the potential to significantly eat into Iran's overwhelming dominant position in the global Saffron market in ATL (without screwing Iran of course)?
 
No idea if the following requires a pre-1900 POD or few though interested to know whether it would be possible to further boost the production of Saffron spice outside of Iran, which currently accounts for around 90–93 percent of recent annual world production and thereby dominates the export market on a by-quantity basis IOTL?

India, Spain, Greece, Afghanistan and a few others like China are the only other notable producers of Saffron IOTL though interested to see which countries with the right PODs have the potential to significantly eat into Iran's overwhelming dominant position in the global Saffron market in ATL (without screwing Iran of course)?
Well kashmir does produce the costliest variety of saffron.
But I don't know if kashmir has the capability to outproduce Iran!

Also do we have to reduce Iran's contribution or replace it?
 
restart production in the UK. Produced a large amount in the middle ages Saffron waldon is so named because it produced saffron
 
Have the U.S. ban imports from Iran after 1979, and heavily subsidize domestic production. This may affect 1980s and 1990s immigration policy: the harvest is apparently very labor-intensive with large numbers of bulbs required to extract a tiny amount of spice.
 

nbcman

Donor
The US and other countries could do like they did with pistachio production - grow their own and impose steep tariffs or embargo Iranian production. That's the reason why the US used to have pistachios with red stained shells in the 1970s (almost exclusively Iranian imports) but now they are unstained (domestically produced).

Source: https://tradevistas.org/pistachio-trade-in-a-nutshell/
 
Someone in Japan gets inspired by Pokémon Red and Blue's Saffron City and tries their hand at giving a new crop for rural communities.
 
Well kashmir does produce the costliest variety of saffron.
But I don't know if kashmir has the capability to outproduce Iran!

Also do we have to reduce Iran's contribution or replace it?

Would say the goal is to try and if possible reduce Iran's share as a Saffron producer from 90-93% (other sources claim 88%) down to about 35-55%, with the other 45-65% Saffron producers outside of Iran being a group of countries who were able to significantly increase production.

Do not know what India/Kashmir's maximum capacity is compared to its current output or other countries like Greece, Spain, Morocco and other minor producers IOTL, though do like the idea of places like Mexico, China as well as parts of Central/East Africa and South America playing a larger role as Saffron producers in ATL.
 
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Do not know what India/Kashmir's maximum capacity is compared to its current output
I do know that kashmir produced 16 metric tonnes of it compared to today's 5.6 metric tonnes.

So if everyone that produced saffron in OTL raises their production by a few margins. I imagine that will reduce Iranian contribution by a fair margin
 
The reason why everyone else produced less is simply that the Iranians produce it more cheaply than elsewhere, which is due to a combination of the ideal climate for saffron and relatively cheap labor costs. Without making it more expensive in Iran (which basically means making labor more expensive, because you're not going to change the climate*) you would have to make it cheaper elsewhere, which is difficult because everywhere else already has cheap labor.

*in a predictable enough way for us to discuss in AH terms
 
Well, it was a specialty crop of Pennsylvania Amish and Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa Mennonites until WWII. Maybe if some entrepreneur subsidizes its reintroduction there the same way Seagram's subsidizes the cultivation of sorghum among Indiana Mennonites to produce Sorgh-Rum(R)...
 
I just wonder why one would wish to reduce Iranian saffron production?Is it a problem somehow?

Of course one is entitled to propose any tasteful alternative history but I am somewhat puzzled as to why this one was chosen.
 
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Nick P

Donor
I just wonder why one would wish to reduce Iranian saffron production?Is it a problem somehow.

Of course one is entitled to propose any tasteful alternative history but I am somewhat puzzled as to why this one was chosen.

Saffron is the worlds most expensive spice at $5000 per kilo. Iran produces over 400 tons per year, far more than any other country. That's worth around $2,200,000,000 (US$2.2billion) to the Iranian economy.
If another country wanted to harm Iran they could produce their own saffron and undercut their prices. That might be a sanction method for things like the Iranian nuclear program.

Alternatively, if you were writing a story about a US-Iranian war you might use the blockade and destruction of the saffron market as a way to show how it affects the world. A side story about smuggling saffron that is suddenly worth $5000 per gram would be one way of showing it.
 
Eventually bioscientists will come up with a synthetic replacement:

Efficient production of saffron crocins and picrocrocin in Nicotiana benthamiana using a virus-driven system

Maricarmen Martí, Gianfranco Diretto, Verónica Aragonés, Sarah Frusciante, Oussama Ahrazem, Lourdes Gómez-Gómez, José-Antonio Daròs

doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2019.12.18.880765
Now published in Metabolic Engineering
 
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Saffron is the worlds most expensive spice at $5000 per kilo. Iran produces over 400 tons per year, far more than any other country. That's worth around $2,200,000,000 (US$2.2billion) to the Iranian economy.
If another country wanted to harm Iran they could produce their own saffron and undercut their prices. That might be a sanction method for things like the Iranian nuclear program.

Alternatively, if you were writing a story about a US-Iranian war you might use the blockade and destruction of the saffron market as a way to show how it affects the world. A side story about smuggling saffron that is suddenly worth $5000 per gram would be one way of showing it.

While having the US going out of its way to break the virtual Iranian monopoly on Saffron would be a straightforward solution, would have assumed the US and other countries would have already done so in ATL like they did with pistachios IOTL.

Based on how labour intensive Saffron is, one can rule out the US being a major producer. Ideally was thinking of a group of countries deciding to increase Saffron production on their own that reduces Iran's global share (beginning either pre or post 1900), similar to other attempts at cultivating spices and other fruit/veg/etc in other countries from where they were previously mostly grown or exclusively found (e.g. Maluku aka Spice Islands).
 

Already happening across the world, this is just one example from outside Iran. There are also small growing operations in USA.
 
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