Human Life Versus Plant Life
By Alan Hamilton
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The worldwide revival of interest in traditional medicine is putting unbearable pressure on natural resources as increasing numbers of plants are harvested for their medicinal properties. Regulation is needed before irreversible damage is done.
Godalming, England: For as long as records have existed, people have relied on plants as the principal components of their medicines. Even today many pharmaceutical drugs are isolated directly through modification of chemicals found in plants, or their development has been inspired by the structures and activities of plant compounds.
About three-quarters of the world's population still uses plant-based preparations in primary health care. In richer countries, herbal medicine is rapidly gaining in popularity because of dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of modern medicines and their side-effects. As pathogenic organisms develop resistance to pharmaceutical medicines, urgent efforts are mounted by companies to uncover more secrets of the plant world and new cures for diseases.
Medicinal plants form by far the largest single category of use of biological resources in numbers of species. It is estimated that at least 25,000 of a total of perhaps 250,000 plant species have been used in this way. In Asia, in particular, there are several systems of plant-based medicine based on long-established written pharmacopoeias, representing the accumulated medical wisdom of ancient times. These are the Chinese, the Tibetan, the Ayurvedic system of India and the Unani system of the Islamic world. Unani, in fact, has developed from the medical practices of the Ancient Greeks.
The vast and expanding market for medicinal plants is placing pressure on resources. Unlike the relatively few species of generally cultivated plants used in the manufacture of pharmaceutical drugs, most species used in herbal preparations are collected in the wild. When harvesting is for local use, there is little over-collection, but the scale of modern commercial pressures on medicinal plants is resulting in widespread depletion.
The Himalayas have been stripped of medicinal plants in some places to feed the demands of distant populations. Large quantities of medicinal plants are smuggled from Nepal into India.
The highly prized medicinal tree Warburgia salutaris has become extinct in Zimbabwe through over-harvesting.
The bark of the montane forest tree, Prunus africana, has been removed extensively in Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Madagascar for export to Europe - a trade currently worth US$220 million a year. Prunus collection on Mt Kilum, Cameroon, has resulted in forests being cleared for agriculture, as traditional taboos on forest clearance have been undermined by modern commercial attitudes.
A few medicinal plants, including Prunus africana, are now listed in CITES, the convention that regulates international trade in endangered species. Concern for conservation of medicinal plants is surfacing at local, national and international levels. A list of recommended measures is published as "Guidelines for the Conservation of Medicinal Plants" by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Conservation Union-IUCN, and the World Wide Fund For Nature-WWF.
The Medicinal Plants Group of the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of IUCN is attempting to identify the most threatened medicinal plants across the globe. TRAFFIC-Europe is coordinating national surveys in some European countries with the co-operation of the German CITES plants office, WWF-UK, DHKD (the Turkish Society for the Preservation of Nature - a WWF Associate) and other organisations and agencies.
One of the factors considered by the SSC survey is the degree of threat to species according to socio-economic as well as biological criteria. Biologically, criteria include the known abundance of species, their degrees of endemism, their growth-forms (trees being typically less resilient than herbs) and the parts of the plants harvested (i.e. leaf collection is less damaging than root collection). The socio-economic indicators include popularity, current prices and changes in price over time - higher prices can indicate growing scarcity.
However, it is impossible to regulate the harvesting of medicinal plants purely through legal mechanisms. Cultivation of threatened species can be a useful measure to take the pressure off wild populations, especially if accompanied by steps to protect wild plants better.
Whatever the uptake of cultivation locally, it seems certain that commercial collection of many medicinal plants will mainly continue to be from the wild. It is therefore urgent that systems of wild collection are made more sustainable. This must involve local communities who have detailed knowledge of the plants, as their scattered occurrence means many can be surreptitiously collected. This makes effective regulation through agencies, such as forest and park departments prohibitively expensive.
Agreements are needed between communities and the managers of protected areas to secure rights of collection for local communities, while maintaining and, if possible, augmenting resources. To be effective, there must be institutions within the local communities, such as societies of herbalists or forest-user groups, to whom rights of collection are assigned, and who in return are responsible for the sustainable harvest of the medicinal plants.
Little progress has yet been made to put the necessary measures in place. A start has been made in Nepal in the Annapurna Conservation Area. A WWF project has initiated similar work at Shey Phoksundo National Park, also in Nepal, with a People and Plants project, jointly undertaken with UNESCO and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Here, local communities survey and establish the sustainability of a collection of medicinal plants.
The aim is to promote agreements between the communities and the park allowing use of medicinal plants in return for their conservation. If such an approach can be shown to be effective, then it can be applied elsewhere to safeguard the future of medicinal plants.
*Alan Hamilton is Plant Conservation Officer at WWF International based in Godalming, UK.
By Alan Hamilton
------------------------------
The worldwide revival of interest in traditional medicine is putting unbearable pressure on natural resources as increasing numbers of plants are harvested for their medicinal properties. Regulation is needed before irreversible damage is done.
Godalming, England: For as long as records have existed, people have relied on plants as the principal components of their medicines. Even today many pharmaceutical drugs are isolated directly through modification of chemicals found in plants, or their development has been inspired by the structures and activities of plant compounds.
About three-quarters of the world's population still uses plant-based preparations in primary health care. In richer countries, herbal medicine is rapidly gaining in popularity because of dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of modern medicines and their side-effects. As pathogenic organisms develop resistance to pharmaceutical medicines, urgent efforts are mounted by companies to uncover more secrets of the plant world and new cures for diseases.
Medicinal plants form by far the largest single category of use of biological resources in numbers of species. It is estimated that at least 25,000 of a total of perhaps 250,000 plant species have been used in this way. In Asia, in particular, there are several systems of plant-based medicine based on long-established written pharmacopoeias, representing the accumulated medical wisdom of ancient times. These are the Chinese, the Tibetan, the Ayurvedic system of India and the Unani system of the Islamic world. Unani, in fact, has developed from the medical practices of the Ancient Greeks.
The vast and expanding market for medicinal plants is placing pressure on resources. Unlike the relatively few species of generally cultivated plants used in the manufacture of pharmaceutical drugs, most species used in herbal preparations are collected in the wild. When harvesting is for local use, there is little over-collection, but the scale of modern commercial pressures on medicinal plants is resulting in widespread depletion.
The Himalayas have been stripped of medicinal plants in some places to feed the demands of distant populations. Large quantities of medicinal plants are smuggled from Nepal into India.
The highly prized medicinal tree Warburgia salutaris has become extinct in Zimbabwe through over-harvesting.
The bark of the montane forest tree, Prunus africana, has been removed extensively in Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Madagascar for export to Europe - a trade currently worth US$220 million a year. Prunus collection on Mt Kilum, Cameroon, has resulted in forests being cleared for agriculture, as traditional taboos on forest clearance have been undermined by modern commercial attitudes.
A few medicinal plants, including Prunus africana, are now listed in CITES, the convention that regulates international trade in endangered species. Concern for conservation of medicinal plants is surfacing at local, national and international levels. A list of recommended measures is published as "Guidelines for the Conservation of Medicinal Plants" by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Conservation Union-IUCN, and the World Wide Fund For Nature-WWF.
The Medicinal Plants Group of the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of IUCN is attempting to identify the most threatened medicinal plants across the globe. TRAFFIC-Europe is coordinating national surveys in some European countries with the co-operation of the German CITES plants office, WWF-UK, DHKD (the Turkish Society for the Preservation of Nature - a WWF Associate) and other organisations and agencies.
One of the factors considered by the SSC survey is the degree of threat to species according to socio-economic as well as biological criteria. Biologically, criteria include the known abundance of species, their degrees of endemism, their growth-forms (trees being typically less resilient than herbs) and the parts of the plants harvested (i.e. leaf collection is less damaging than root collection). The socio-economic indicators include popularity, current prices and changes in price over time - higher prices can indicate growing scarcity.
However, it is impossible to regulate the harvesting of medicinal plants purely through legal mechanisms. Cultivation of threatened species can be a useful measure to take the pressure off wild populations, especially if accompanied by steps to protect wild plants better.
Whatever the uptake of cultivation locally, it seems certain that commercial collection of many medicinal plants will mainly continue to be from the wild. It is therefore urgent that systems of wild collection are made more sustainable. This must involve local communities who have detailed knowledge of the plants, as their scattered occurrence means many can be surreptitiously collected. This makes effective regulation through agencies, such as forest and park departments prohibitively expensive.
Agreements are needed between communities and the managers of protected areas to secure rights of collection for local communities, while maintaining and, if possible, augmenting resources. To be effective, there must be institutions within the local communities, such as societies of herbalists or forest-user groups, to whom rights of collection are assigned, and who in return are responsible for the sustainable harvest of the medicinal plants.
Little progress has yet been made to put the necessary measures in place. A start has been made in Nepal in the Annapurna Conservation Area. A WWF project has initiated similar work at Shey Phoksundo National Park, also in Nepal, with a People and Plants project, jointly undertaken with UNESCO and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Here, local communities survey and establish the sustainability of a collection of medicinal plants.
The aim is to promote agreements between the communities and the park allowing use of medicinal plants in return for their conservation. If such an approach can be shown to be effective, then it can be applied elsewhere to safeguard the future of medicinal plants.
*Alan Hamilton is Plant Conservation Officer at WWF International based in Godalming, UK.
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