In Pursuit of Garlic (9 page)

Volunteer cooking assistants mill about. TV crews carefully pick their way through the proceedings, filming the sweating chefs in close-up and medium frame, while their assistants carefully keep the cables out of the way. Close-ups are displayed on two immense screens on either side of the stage, food porn for us to slaver over. A sunscreen over the stage and the bleachers keeps the rest of us cool and comfortable—and cuts glare for the TV cameras.

It’s Food Network outdoors, live, with no commercials. The shows go on all day without a break. Everyone is having fun—the important thing at the Gilroy Garlic Festival—and I am too.

From the beginning, the festival has had a sixth sense for publicity. In 1979 the first festival played a role in Les Blank’s garlic-giddy documentary
Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers.
It features one of the three founders, Val Filice, who died in 2007. A second founder, Rudy Melone, died in 1998. The third founder, Don Christopher, happens to sit down beside me in the front row of the bleachers as I’m settling in for the rest of the afternoon.

“Aren’t you Don Christopher?” I ask. “I saw your picture on the program—you’re just the fellow I’d like to talk to.” He looks at me a little like I’m a door-to-door salesman who’s just shown up at dinnertime, but he agrees to chat a while. “Val had a personality and presence like no one else,” he says. “He got the cooperation of everyone.” Don credits Rudy with coming up with the idea for the festival. Rudy was convinced Gilroy was the true garlic capital of the world in spite of a claim made by Arleux, France, which was drawing seventy thousand people to its annual festival in the 1970s. All Gilroy had to do was have a bigger festival to prove it, Rudy said, and it’s been doing that every year since.

As for himself, Don says he’s just a farmer at heart, born on a prune farm near Gilroy with a love of the earth in his genes. But he grew up with a strong entrepreneurial streak. As a lad of twenty-two he bought land and started Christopher Ranch to grow garlic. One might say that organizing a garlic festival with his buddies once he got established didn’t hurt his business, but both Christopher Ranch and the festival have done a lot for Gilroy.

Christopher Ranch harvests 65 million pounds (30 million kilos) of garlic a year in eight fields around Gilroy as well as on leased land in Monterey County and the San Joaquin Valley. “We supply California garlic to the whole country, including parts of Canada, every day of the year,” Don says. “We even borrowed something from the apple guys: we built special cold-storage facilities where we take all the oxygen out and put the garlic to sleep till we need it.”

Don looks more than a little grim when I mention Chinese garlic. “A few years ago China brought garlic into the United States below cost and took over a whole lot of the market,” he says. “In fact, it took over nearly the whole world, including Canada. We had to cut our acreage down to about 55 percent.” But then the flow started to slow down. With next to no money coming into their pockets, Don says, Chinese farmers got wise and quit growing garlic in favor of other vegetables. “We didn’t know that had happened till suddenly the Chinese price went up to nearly match ours.”

But Don hadn’t let the opportunities of cheap Chinese garlic slip through his fingers. “I bought a lot of it and sold it at a profit,” he says.

“You did? No kidding,” I respond. Now there’s bold entrepreneurial spirit.

“Yes, I did. And we sold it rapidly. Everyone was going crazy about the situation, but I figured if I could make a little money on it while others wept, why not?”

“You didn’t sell it as your own garlic, did you?” I ask, a little worried about Don’s scruples.

“I wouldn’t do
that!
” He looks surprised that I would even suggest such a thing. “We wouldn’t compete with ourselves. We often buy and sell garlic from other countries if we think we’re going to be short or if we have too much. We sold it as Chinese garlic to people who were already buying Chinese garlic. So I made money on it, and I had a lot of fun, too.”

Don isn’t exactly a garlic lover himself. He eats it maybe three times a week, slivered and inserted into the meat he barbecues. “I prefer to grow it,” he says. “I love seeing those green tips coming up in spring when everything else is going into the ground. But what I like the best is marketing it. It’s exciting. I like dealing with buyers and agreeing on a price, I like packing it and shipping it. And I like developing products, like the green garlic we package for garnish and the like. You harvest it when it’s eight to twelve weeks along. Its stalks are tender and mild...”

He looks over my shoulder and waves at his little granddaughter. “She’s looking for me,” he says. He’s had enough chat and is clearly itching to get moving. That’s okay—I’ve had a revealing glimpse of some of the energy that’s made the Gilroy Garlic Festival so successful all these years.

The growing and processing of garlic will move to China. There’s nothing to stop it.

CAO MENGHUI, Jinan Yipin Corp. Ltd., garlic producer and exporter, Shandong, China

NEARLY THE whole world, not just Don Christopher, is angry about Chinese garlic and the way it’s been marketed and exported—or dumped, to be blunt. And some countries aren’t going to take it anymore. They’ve been fighting back with huge tariffs or fines, plus jail sentences for garlic smuggling. Yes, cheap Chinese garlic is such a prized commodity in some places that it’s smuggled across borders disguised as onions or other produce. But the big issue in North America over the past decade has been dumping, and it’s forced many garlic growers to reduce production, like Don Christopher, or to go out of business entirely.

In the United States, the first wave of Chinese garlic appeared in the mid-1990s, at half the cost of California garlic. The Chinese were found to be selling it at less than their cost—which, given their workers’ subsistence wages plus the inexpensive containers used to ship goods, is ridiculously low to begin with. The United States levied a hefty 377 percent tariff on the garlic, the highest imposed on any product crossing its borders. It slowed down imports for a few years, but the Chinese claimed they weren’t dumping and filed for a review of the charges, leading to a lengthy hearing.

Then a loophole in the regulations was discovered, and Chinese garlic began to make its way back into California and other American ports. Imports increased tenfold in three years in the mid-2000s, to 86 million pounds (39 million kilos) by 2005, 5 million pounds (2.3 million kilos) more garlic than was grown in California and up from a meager 365,000 pounds (166,000 kilos) in 2000. The industry was shrinking in California: from 1999 to 2004, the number of acres devoted to growing garlic dropped from 40,000 to 26,000 (from 16,000 to 10,000 hectares), and some growers said they were making no profit at all.

Lawyers for the American garlic industry defending the tariff argued that the Chinese wanted to corner the U.S. market, and the Chinese were accused of using fraudulent schemes to avoid paying customs duties, such as shipping through countries like Vietnam and Japan and falsifying the true country of origin. “The system is not set up to deal with the degree of creativity the Chinese bring to the market,” one lawyer for the California producers told a reporter for SFGate.com.

In Canada, the situation was, and is, similar. “In 2001, China began dumping garlic on the Ontario market for about 40 cents a pound [88 cents a kilo] wholesale. A grower here needed $1.50 to make it viable,” says Mark Wales, president of the Garlic Growers Association of Ontario. “I call that predatory dumping.” He, too, thinks the Chinese want to take over the garlic industry.

Canadian garlic had its start as an industry in the late 1980s, when farmers planted garlic and ginseng as alternatives to the once-lucrative tobacco crops. It takes a few years to establish a good supply of garlic because it’s grown not from seed, as are other vegetables, but from the six to twelve cloves each plant produces, resulting in six to twelve plants—a lot less than the hundreds of plants possible from the seeds of a beet or a carrot. It takes years for a garlic crop to become large enough to supply the market. By 2000, 3,500 to 4,000 acres (1,400 to 1,600 hectares) of garlic were being grown commercially in Ontario (which grows 95 percent of Canada’s garlic). Then the Chinese invaded. Canadian garlic wasn’t worth the cost of harvesting.

“The crop size dropped to about 400 acres in one season,” Mark says. Within two years it was down to 200, or about 80 hectares. “Our association was successful in getting a five-year tariff of about 80 cents a pound [$1.75 a kilo] levied on the garlic. That brought the Chinese wholesale price up to about $1.25, the same as garlic from Mexico. There was no garlic from China anymore, but all of a sudden 11 million kilos”—24 million pounds—“the same as had come from China, was coming in from Pakistan and the Philippines, countries that had never shipped garlic to Canada before.” Although the invoices said the products were from those countries, in many cases the original labels were still on the box: “Product of China.”

The tariff expired in 2007, and it wasn’t renewed, at least in part because the garlic growers felt the government hadn’t been vigilant in enforcing the rules when it was obvious that the Pakistani and Filipino garlic originated in China. The shame of it is that domestic garlic was on the brink of commercial success in 2001. Warren Ham, director of anti-dumping for the Garlic Growers Association of Ontario and a grower himself, says the industry was robust enough to supply all the garlic the market needed; it might even have built a climate-controlled warehouse, like the one at Christopher Ranch, so that supplies could be available nearly year-round.

“But it’s not as if we can’t get back there again,” he says. “We have a choice: we could put our garlic back in the ground and wrap up production for five years down the road till we can supply bigger crops.” Or garlic could continue to be what it’s become: a cottage industry, marketed at fairs and farmers’ markets and via mail order. But if growers decide to invest in the future by propagating their crops of garlic for a few years, they need to find another way to earn enough income to support their families in the meantime.

Like most consumers, I had little idea of the effect Chinese garlic had had on growers; I was more consumed by the effect it had on me. How many times have I exchanged complaints with fellow shoppers over bins of those Asian bulbs, deploring the small size that makes the tiny inner cloves hardly worth the effort it takes to peel them, or the little green shoots that mean the garlic is past its prime, or the squishy feeling under the papery skin that means it’s advanced to the point of death? But the garlic effect goes further than the grocery store and mild complaints between shoppers, and it’s arguably bigger than the problems American and Canadian growers are experiencing. It’s also started trade wars and has caused political conflict in other countries.

In Thailand in 2008 the price of garlic dropped from 40 baht to about 17 baht per kilo (from 60 cents to 25 cents per pound)—less than it cost to grow it—and created hardship for many less-than-affluent growers. The culprit was Chinese garlic, huge amounts of which were allowed into the country under a trade agreement. The government’s solution was to encourage the cultivation of potatoes, which were relatively inexpensive to grow. But where were they to be sold? Potatoes aren’t a big part of the Thai diet, and what market there was demanded only perfectly uniform potatoes in pristine condition.

Farmers protested. Garlic became part of an overall political issue as garlic growers joined truck drivers, rice farmers, and fishermen, all wanting assistance in fighting inflation. Samak Sundaravej, who was prime minister of Thailand for a few months in 2008 and considered himself a gourmand (he was known for his pork marinated in Coca-Cola), tried to alleviate the garlic situation. In one of his Sunday addresses to the country he praised the virtues of the beautifully flavorful and much stronger Thai garlic and urged citizens to use it. But the prime minister spoke out of both sides of his mouth. At about the same time an existing highway through Laos from Kunming, China, to Bangkok was being refurbished to cut the driving time of trucks bringing garlic and other fruits and vegetables from China to Thailand.

In Korea, a trade war over garlic erupted in 2000. Koreans were angry about cheap Chinese garlic, so a 315 percent tariff was slapped on it. China thought that was unfair, so it declared a ban on Korea’s mobile phones and polyethylene products. The dispute seems one-sided, however, since Korea’s banned products amounted to about US$413 million, whereas the garlic from China was worth about US$15 million.

Does
anyone
like Chinese garlic?

Well, smugglers do. It’s cheap, and if you can find a way to avoid the customs duties levied by many countries, you might make a fortune. Then again, you might get caught.

The Calcutta
Telegraph
reported that in late January 2011, in a midnight operation, more than 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilos) of Chinese garlic were seized in and around the railway station in Raxaul, India. It had been brought over the border by women and children, presumably because they would arouse less suspicion than a group of men. The previous December, nearly one hundred sacks were seized in the same place. The garlic came from Nepal, where it costs half what it does in India.

In Poland in January 2011, European Union customs police seized six shipping containers containing garlic disguised as onions, which are taxed at a lower rate. The garlic had come from China via Rotterdam and wasn’t the first shipment to be caught.

In 2009, a similar quantity of Chinese garlic had been smuggled into the European Union via Norway, which exempts garlic from customs duties, by an international group of smugglers. The garlic was worth an estimated €1.5 million in customs duties to the European countries it was surreptitiously headed for. The smuggling had gone on for some time, apparently, and the European Anti-Fraud Office launched an investigation in May 2010. A month later a truck carrying a full load of garlic was stopped.