Recommendations for sustainable Medicinal Aromatic Plant activities which require enabling public policy to facilitate technical support.

Cultivation surveys can help identify species cultivated, where, volumes produced and market values, as well as public domestication programmes, and in-situ and ex-situ conservation efforts for wild populations of species in cultivation. 

Sustainable wild harvest management schemes supported by governments and authorities, necessitating management plans as standard for any wild harvesting with associated capacity building to improve monitoring and evaluation. Small-scale cultivation enterprises need to be strengthened to enable primary producers and local communities to better compete with large-scale high-tech cultivation. 

Gene banks need to be developed, particularly for habitat specific, slow-growing species with high susceptibility of being over-harvested. Domestication programmes need to be expanded, taking fuller advantage of the genetic and chemical diversity within species over wide geographical areas. 

Research to investigate the sustainability of production systems to be stimulated for a better understanding of the biological dynamics of the resource in the wild and in domestication.

User rights over the resource and access to it need to be clarified. This is particularly the case where MAPs are considered common property. This needs to be recognized as a crucial factor enabling or preventing a sustainable harvest from wild populations.

 Certification standards including eco-labelling and other social and economic incentives to strengthen market credibility and competitiveness of biodiversity-friendly products promoted. 

The private sector should be encouraged to consider local livelihoods and biodiversity when setting up ethical and environmental standards. 

Policies and legislation need to be adapted and implemented to recognize the value of and need for sustainable wild harvesting management regimes, to implement national and/or regional permit systems and make MAP conservation a priority for national health and economic policy. 

Intellectual property rights need to be acknowledged so that local users or other entities can be adequately compensated for use of the resource by outsiders.