Wildcrafting and sustainability

What it is

The harvesting of medicinal plants from the wild rather than from cultivation, and the pressure that a worldwide commercial market puts on populations that evolved to supply a village.

Estimates from TRAFFIC and the IUCN Medicinal Plant Specialist Group put the number of medicinal and aromatic plant species in trade in the tens of thousands, of which the large majority are still collected from the wild rather than cultivated. Several thousand are assessed as threatened.

Where it came from

Local gathering by people who lived where the plants grew. That arrangement contained its own limit: a person harvesting a patch they would return to next year had every reason not to strip it, and many traditions encode that as etiquette — leave the first plant you find, take no more than a proportion, ask, give something back.

The market broke the feedback loop. When the collector is paid by weight by a buyer for an export chain, and does not depend on that patch next year, nothing in the transaction registers the cost of taking all of it.

How it is done

By digging, cutting or stripping, usually by hand, usually by people paid very little. The most pressured plants are the ones harvested for their roots or bark, because taking those kills the plant, and because slow-growing perennials are exactly what most traditions consider the strongest medicine.

This article describes the practice and its consequences. It is not a foraging guide and contains no identification or harvesting guidance.

What we can and cannot say

We can name the plants in the worst trouble.

• American ginseng — CITES Appendix II. Wild roots command extraordinary prices, and poaching from US national parks is a persistent law-enforcement problem.
• Goldenseal — CITES Appendix II, heavily over-harvested, slow to reproduce.
• Wild yam, black cohosh, slippery elm, osha — all under documented pressure in North America.
• Himalayan species — Nardostachys (spikenard), Saussurea costus, several Aconitum — under severe pressure from high-altitude collection.
• Agarwood and sandalwood — driven by perfume as much as medicine, with illegal logging.
• Devil's claw in southern Africa, Prunus africana in the Cameroon highlands, and rooibos, whose wild relatives are threatened while the cultivated crop is fine.

We can say the bark-and-root problem is structural rather than incidental. Harvesting a leaf is a haircut; harvesting a root is a death. Prunus africana was stripped of bark for prostate preparations to the point of population collapse across parts of its range before CITES controls. A tradition that rates roots most highly and a market that pays by weight will together take the roots.

We can say cultivation solves most of this and is resisted for reasons that are partly real. Cultivated material is available, traceable, consistent and not depleting anything. Practitioners argue that wild plants are stronger, and this is not simply romanticism — a plant under environmental stress does produce different secondary metabolite profiles, and secondary metabolites are frequently the active compounds. It is also true that "wild-harvested" is a premium marketing term, that the premium creates the harvesting pressure, and that the strength claim is very rarely quantified for the specific plant being sold.

We can say the same premium drives adulteration. When a wild root is scarce and expensive, the economic incentive to substitute a cheaper species is exactly the incentive that produced the failures described under regulation and adulteration. Scarcity and substitution are the same problem seen from two ends.

And we can say the benefit-sharing question is unresolved. The collectors at the bottom of these chains are usually rural, usually poor, and usually paid a tiny fraction of the retail price. The Nagoya Protocol exists to address access and benefit-sharing for genetic resources and traditional knowledge; it entered force in 2014, its coverage is partial and its enforcement is weak. FairWild certification is a serious attempt at a standard for wild-collected material and covers a small share of the trade.

We can say what is checkable by a buyer, since everything above is structural: cultivated is better than wild-harvested for almost every commonly traded species; FairWild and comparable certification means someone has audited the collection; and a plant sold as wild-harvested at scale is a claim worth being sceptical about, because the volumes required generally cannot be met that way.

We cannot quantify the losses precisely — wild population data for most of these species is poor, which is itself part of the problem. What can be said is that the traditions being drawn on were built around plants that were local and limited, that the market is neither, and that "natural" here means "taken from somewhere that had a finite amount of it".

Further reading

• The IUCN Medicinal Plant Specialist Group's assessments.
• TRAFFIC's reports on the medicinal and aromatic plant trade.
• The FairWild Standard, for what an audited supply chain actually requires.