Connecting Global Priorities Biodiversity and Human Health

among healers and act according to self-regulatory guidelines, which have been evolved through a
participatory process based on the contextual peculiarities of each province. Healers associations
along with NGOs and forest departments have been actively engaged in supporting medicinal plant
conservation programmes in various states.
The MPCN is also working on the following issues:
• establishing herbal gardens;
• developing appraisal systems of healers capacities and training programmes;
• conducting action research interventions in key health areas such as malaria;
• facilitating networking through organizing medical camps, and district- and state-level conventions
of healers associations, but also healer exchange visits within the country and among other Asian
and African countries.
Box 3. Sustainable harvest and standards – The FairWild Standard example
The FairWild Standard provides a set of best practice guidelines for the sustainable use and trade
of wild harvested medicinal plants. It provides a basis for assessing the harvest and trade of wild
plants against various ecological, social and economic requirements. It was developed through
a multistakeholder consultation process that has engaged a wide range of organizations and
individuals involved with the harvesting and trade of these resources.
Use of the FairWild Standard helps support eorts to ensure that plants are managed, harvested
and traded in a way that maintains populations in the wild and benets rural producers. Version
2.0 of the Standard was developed following the merger of two initiatives: International Standard
for Sustainable Wild Collection of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (ISSC-MAP), which focused on
ecological conservation and some social/ethical aspects, and the original FairWild Standard, which
focused on social and fair trade aspects. The resulting set of principles and criteria covers eleven key
areas of sustainability. It is designed to be an applicable framework in a variety of implementation
contexts, as well as to be used as the basis for a third-party certication scheme.
During the development of the FairWild Standard, a number of pilot projects were carried out in
locations around the world to test its applicability. These projects included the collection of ingredients
used in traditional medicine; for example, the pilots of ISSC-MAP in India under the project “Saving
Plants that Save Lives and Livelihoods”, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic
Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and implemented by FRLHT and TRAFFIC India. One of the
rst studies was conducted in Karnataka, India. Through a participatory planning approach involving
various stakeholders such as scientists and community members, a task team was set up for mapping
resources and elaborating a sustainable harvesting strategy. As part of the methodology involved
documentation of medicinal plant-related knowledge and non-timber forest product (NTFP) collection
practices, resource assessments were conducted for selected species. Training was provided for
mapping and assessing dierent harvesting methods. It was found that a well-organized stakeholder
group can plan and implement an eective participatory resource management strategy. Apart from
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