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Quinoa’s rise and fall What goes up will come down

17 March 2025

Quinoa growing in the foreground with steep mountains behind. In the sky above the valley is a graph of the price of quinoa

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Portrait of a young woman with shoulder-length light brown hair. She is wearing a dark round-necked top and a necklace.
Emma McDonnell
For most of the 2000s, farmers in Peru earned a little more than one sol per kilogram of unprocessed quinoa they sold. Starting around 2007, the price began to climb as quinoa exports became a thing, averaging 9 soles per kg in 2014. The following year, the price halved, and it dropped again in 2016. It’s still around 4 soles per kg, so a lot better than it was, and quinoa production is double what it was. Nevertheless, the early promise of a sustained quinoa boom proved to be an illusion.

Emma McDonnell was in Peru for the early years of the boom and for the subsequent bust, a story she recounts in her book The Quinoa Bust.

Notes

  1. Emma McDonnell has a website. Her book The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop is published by California University Press.
  2. A previous episode — It is OK to eat quinoa — looked at the impact of the boom in purely economic terms.
  3. An issue of the USDA’s Choices magazine looked at several so-called functional foods, including quinoa, asking whether they were a Fad or Path to Prosperity?. Both, maybe.
  4. Here is the transcript
  5. The banner photo uses a picture of quinoa growing in Ollantaytambo, Peru by Hector Montero. The quinoa close up on the cover is by Flickered!

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Eat This Podcast has been going since March 2013. That’s a long time in podcast world. In that time, it has twice been nominated for a James Beard Award, although it remains a labour of love rather than a search for glory.

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