Opportunities and challenges for improved livelihoods.

 

- Opportunities - 

Medicinal Aromatic Plants (MAPs) can play an important role in contributing to the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and others in rural, peri-urban, and urban communities. The opportunities abound in terms of MAPs as they can contribute to: 

• Small-scale farmers enhancing their knowledge, skills and capacity in terms of a new enterprise as well as enhancing their environmental awareness, especially in terms of wild harvests, and its importance to them;

 • Enhancing small-scale farmers knowledge in terms of MAPs role in traditional healthcare systems; 

• The variety of products that can be derived from a single MAP; 

• Small-scale farmers having more varied farm products to trade; • Having more farm products to sell enables a more balanced flow of cash income to the farm household throughout the year, especially in terms of processed MAPs;

• Increased incomes for small-scale farmers as well as other members of communities who participate in production/ gathering of MAPs; 

• Improved living standards as a result of extra income as this can pay for such matters as school fees, for example, and access to traditional medicines and health care systems, etc.; 

• Farm products that can possibly have a high market value, especially if processed; 

• Adding value to farm products with primary and secondary processing operations on farm enabling small-scale farmers to move down the supply chain

• Linkages with processing enterprises and possibilities of providing pharmaceutical companies with ‘raw materials’; 

• Participating in Fair Trade and organic MAPs distribution network

• Fostering organization among small-scale farmers and other people in local communities, especially in the case of wild harvests and provides for community social benefits;

 • Activities that are highly combinable both with household duties, and other livelihood activities, and as such particularly suitable to women; 

• Cultivation/wild harvest as well as processing of MAPs by women. This enabling them to enter

- Challenges -

 Many of the challenges facing MAP activities are not uncommon to many small-scale farmers. However, as MAPs represent the only source of healthcare to much of the world’s rural poor, resource exploitation must be ecologically and socially sustainable to ensure the protection of millions of livelihoods. It would be wise for any development of MAP activities beyond a subsistence use, to proceed with much caution, even at local trade level, and with particular attention to sustainable harvesting. Promoting cultivation of MAPs with appropriate training and environmental sound practices is one step in the right direction. Trading MAPs on a scale beyond local or regional level can be labour and management intensive and requires a good understanding of resource management and sustainable yields, and how markets work, and what phytosanitary and other legal requirements exist. As such, export markets remain largely the domain of pharmaceuticals, unless regional or national assistance can be secured to help niche marketing of products into wider domestic or even international markets. All production systems reliant largely upon wild harvest are vulnerable to sporadic yields, and indeed overharvesting leading to local, or even regional species decline. As such all natural resources must be closely monitored, and successful and sustainable trade will rely upon controls on the supply side, rather than being demand led. Where species traits make it possible, a shift from wild harvest to cultivated sources can provide a more secure supply, but moving from subsistence use to trade and marketing can be quite challenging to local harvesters and growers. Although there are examples of highly organized supply chains associated with large scale phyto pharmaceutical companies, much of the global MAP industry is characterized and handicapped by fragmented and uncoordinated raw material supply, lack of communication and coordination relating to demand, and limited product diversity and institutional organization. Successful businesses should empower small-scale farmers, wild harvesters, traders and Traditional healers through skills transfer, helping them to accumulate wealth and income through equitable trade; achieve consistently high quality products; and source investment capital from the private sector to finance new initiatives. Achieving these goals requires a mix of institutional arrangements that promote the sustainable and profitable use of resources by encouraging investment, efficiency, and fairness in the distribution of benefits. As such, some key constraints facing small-scale MAP activities include the following: 

• Cultivation know-how and unpredictable nature of plant availability and quality, unless it can be cultivated or in some way domesticated, and the limited technical knowledge, and/or suitable species and land tenure system, to facilitate this; 

• Poor organizational capacity and lack of political influence coupled with an absence of support services which are well equipped and reliable in providing simple but effective technical know-how, business development advice, and or credit, to smallholders; • Poor infrastructure which acts as a general constraint for equitable market access, and economic growth in rural areas, often resulting in seasonal failures; 

• A lack of research and business opportunities directed towards small-scale development of MAP activities; 

• Lack of enabling policies that favour access into or encourage responsible small-scale or community based trade, which may include social and financial incentives, such as tax breaks or ecologically oriented subsidies. 

Finally, additional challenges associated with traditional medicine, and regulatory environment, safety, patient use and sustainability, as identified by WHO.