Growing the Wealth of the Poor - World Resources Institute

BOX 2.6CURING POVERTY?TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE MEDICINALS MARKETE V E N I N T H E E R A O F M O D E R N , L A B - D E S I G N E Dpharmaceuticals, medicinal plants are big business. Approximately47 percent of conventional drugs on the market todayare either natural products or directly derived from theseproducts (Newman and Cragg 2007:461). Pharmaceuticalcompanies are putting more resources than ever intobioprospecting in the hopes of finding new cures hidden in theworld’s forests and deserts (Kursar et al. 2006:1006). In 2007,the global trade in medicinal plants was estimated at US$78billion and growing, propelled by a burgeoning alternativehealth care market and increasing demand for natural cosmeticsacross the United States and Europe. Experts predict thatthe medicinals trade will continue to grow at about 7 percentannually for the foreseeable future (Lambert et al. 2005:21).Such expansion presents a prime opportunity for rural, naturebasedenterprises to capitalize on a market in which they holda natural advantage. But it also highlights the challenge ofadvancing what has always been a low-margin business for ruralresidents into a higher-value enterprise—and doing so withoutoverexploiting the fragile natural resource base.The first is for villagers to capture more value from the medicinalsthey harvest, requiring a shift away from the current systemin which most benefits accrue to pharmaceutical companies andintermediary traders. The second challenge is to make medicinalplant collection more sustainable by reversing the habitatdegradation and overharvesting trends common in commercialmedicinal production. Fortunately, experience indicates that thesolutions to these problems are often complementary.Ninety percent of the medicinals that are traded on the globalmarket are still harvested from the wild, even though manystudies have indicated the importance of increasing medicinalcultivation to meet growing global demand (FAO 2005:5;Schippmann et al. 2002:8–11). The low prices received byharvesting communities and the habitat degradation associatedwith plant collection stem from the fact that, in most instances,there are no effective government or community controls on theharvest of wild medicinal plants—a de facto open-access situationthat undermines ecosystem health and disadvantages poorrural residents, who typically have little market power.98Rural AdvantageRural and indigenous communities hold a comparative advantagewhen it comes to medicinal plant collection andpreparation since they already account for much of the globalproduction and use of medicinals. For many rural residents,harvesting medicinals is an important—although limited—contributor to total income. For example, studies show that inIndia’s western Himalaya, nomadic tribes rely on medicinalplant cultivation and sales for 5–10 percent of their income(Shekhar and Badola 2000:275). In rural Kwazulu-Natal inSouth Africa, the 16,000 medicinal plant gatherers in theregion earn an average of between US$67 and US$98 permonth for their efforts (Mander 1998:Sec. 5.4). Medicinalsalso provide direct health benefits to people across the developingworld, 80 percent of whom use such treatments as theirprimary source of health care (WHO 2006). With the knowledgeand resources that these communities currently use in theirmedicinals production, they seem well situated to play a centralrole in the growing global medicinals market.Dual Challenges:Capturing Value, Harvesting SustainablyRural communities must address two major challenges if theyare to use medicinal plants to their advantage in the long term.The reality of the supply side is that harvesters rarely own theland on which they harvest (Schippmann et al. 2002:7,10–11).The individuals who collect the specimens tend to work alone,selling their raw products to traders and processors. In areaswhere employment options are few, these collectors are willingto devote many hours to collection and must accept whateverthe traders offer them at the end of the day. Frequently,harvesters are forced to travel farther and farther to find wildmedicinal stocks as plants disappear with overharvesting andhabitat destruction caused by timber cuts and land conversion(Mander 1998:Sec. 5.1.1.1). One estimate suggests that suchdestruction and overcollection has led to the endangerment ofmore than 4,000 medicinal plants worldwide (Schippmann etal 2002:3–4).The Prunus Africana tree of Cameroon is one of these endangeredplants. P. Africana was once harvested primarily by localswho used it for wooden tools and to treat chest pain and malaria(WWF 2002:1). In the 1970s, pharmaceutical companies beganto use the plant’s bark to treat prostate gland hypertrophy.Cameroon’s government eventually allowed all pharmaceuticalcompanies access to its forests as a way to promote competition,and unsustainable harvest practices became the norm. Whenthese practices combined with ongoing deforestation, the P.Africana population plummeted. The rural communities, leftwithout their once-common medicinal resource, reaped fewcommercial benefits from the deforestation. The trees’harvesters were either outsiders working for foreign pharmaceuticalcompanies or locals who gained little for their effortsbecause they accepted the low prices offered by intermediarytraders (Stewart 2003:566–567).