Farmers Wait for Kampot Pepper GI
05 December 2012
Pepper farmers in Cambodia’s Kampot province have grown weary with continued delays in granting them intellectual property rights protection, according to a report in the Phnom Penh Post.
The farmers had expected to receive a geographic indication for their black pepper by the end of 2009. Kampot pepper is regarded by some chefs as one of the world’s finest pepper varieties, who compare the pepper’s complexity to that of a fine red wine: where several different tastes affect different areas of the palate.
The paper, citing an unnamed expert, attributed the delays to a lack of leadership in introducing the measures necessary for making Cambodia’s relatively small output of black pepper globally competitive.
“The problem is there is no grading here, and no actual processing plants,” the expert told the Post. “If you have correct quality control, you can access the EU or Japanese markets, where they have very high standards.”
Jean-Marie Brun of Groupe de Recherche et d’Echanges Technologiques (GRET), a non-governmental organization that supports Kampot farmers, told the newspaper that certification was being held up by requests for supporting documents by the Ministry of Commerce. Brun told the Post that he hopes the repeatedly delayed process will be completed next month.
Jerome Benezech, director of Farmlink, told the Post that 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of black pepper are produced annually in Cambodia, mostly in Kampong Cham province, but that it must be shipped to Vietnam for processing because there are no domestic processing facilities outside Kampot.
