Why the saffron is always being costly?

 Saffron is the most expensive among spices, costing "$5000-USD per pound". Eventhough it is costly, it is used all over the world. it is used for direct intake, perfumes, etc...

Iran produces 95 per cent of the world's saffron. India, along with Spain, Italy, Greece,  and Morocco  produce the rest. Kashmir is India's only saffron producing centre.

Saffron is expensive for two reasons 

(1) labour intensiveness; 

(2) rarity. 

 Each flower has 3 stamens (or threads), each flower is picked by hand, and each flower is de-threaded by hand. It takes about 100,000 flowers to produce a kilo of Saffron. Numerous attemps to mechanise harvesting have not been successful…yet. 

For a kilogram of the saffron flowers  nearly 1 lakh of saffron flowers are manually harvested by hand and the stamens are manually pluged by hand . Thus it involves large amount of labours to get tones of saffron. Hence the saffron is always being highly expensive spice.