Saffron SOS: Saving Spain’s golden crop
POUND for pound it is more expensive than gold, but two decades ago Spain’s golden crop was on the verge of disappearing.
Price volatility and cheap imports from Iran had driven the country’s saffron producers to the brink, causing production to plummet from a high of 50,000kg in the 1980s to just 100kg in the late 1990s.
Thankfully, producers such as Antonio Delgado decided to take matters into their own hands, creating an industry-run regulatory body in an effort to level prices and applying for PDO status to prevent inferiorquality, imported saffron being confused with their produce.
Senor Delgado, head of saffron grower and packing group Cefran and president of the industry’s regulatory body, says: “In 1999 the EU recognised the PDO status of La Mancha saffron, which has been vital to us.
“We were having huge issues of fraud, with poor-quality Saffron being imported from Iran and packaged and labelled as Spanish. As exports grew, we could not compete and more and more growers were being pushed out of production.”
Known as the ‘bread for the poor’, true La Mancha saffron is notoriously difficult and expensive to produce. Grown on small plots of land of 1–2.5ha (2–6 acres), up to 5,000kg of…
