Reflections from Nepal - Sustainable Herbs Initiative

Exploring medicinal plant projects in Nepal

By Ann Armbrecht, PhD

I first visited Nepal in the mid-1980s to teach English in a Tibetan refugee school just south of Kathmandu. For my second visit in the 1990s, I was pursuing a doctorate in social anthropology. In fall 2022, I returned for the first time in 25 years with filmmaker Terrence Youk to film two initiatives.

The first project focused on documenting the trade of jatamansi (Nardostachys jatamansi, Caprifoliaceae). “Himalayan Plants for People,” a project led by the global nonprofit TRAFFIC, promotes the legal and sustainable international trade of jatamansi and other wild-harvested alpine plants.^1,2,a The second was a partnership between Pukka Herbs and Yogi Tea, investing in a project in certified organic ginger (Zingiber officinale, Zingiberaceae) growing communities initiated by the Martin Bauer Group, the world’s largest supplier of medicinal plants.

Our goal in visiting Nepal and observing these two projects was to document the role that the medicinal plant trade has in rural livelihoods, conservation, supporting biodiversity, and building soil health. This article is a report of our trip and my initial impressions. (For more in-depth quantitative and qualitative research on the medicinal plant trade in Nepal, see Fold et al [2023].)³

I will share more details about these initiatives as I go through the film footage of our interviews and we begin producing two videos that will be available later in 2023 from the American Botanical Council’s (ABC’s) Sustainable Herbs Program (SHP).

Medicinal Plant Trade in Nepal

The annual export of medicinal plant products from Nepal is between 7,000 and 27,000 metric tons, worth $11 million to $48 million in 2020 values.² Medicinal plants are the largest source of exports in Nepal, explained Carsten Smith-Hall, a Dutch anthropologist researching the medicinal plant trade in Nepal, when we interviewed him. But much of this trade is undocumented. Based on surveys that he and other researchers have conducted,⁴ they have documented around 300 species in trade, with five species comprising about 95% of that trade: Chinese caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis, Ophiocordycipitaceae), kutki (Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora, Plantaginaceae), jatamansi, morels (Morchella spp., Morchellaceae), and Indian bay leaf (Cinnamomum tamala, Lauraceae). No other export items in Nepal are more valuable, he told us, but because traders underreport the quantities in trade, the official figures do not represent the actual trade. Smith-Hall and others have been trying to collect empirical data to quantify the trade in a more robust way and have found that hundreds of thousands of households throughout the country are involved in this trade.²

Smith-Hall said that because the data are not included in the government statistics, until recently there has been little focus on developing the sector either to benefit harvesters or generate “green” jobs. Caitlin Schindler, project manager for Himalayan Plants for People initiative, said that this shift is in part due to the initiative.⁵

Wild Harvesting Jatamansi

The “Succeeding with CITES” project (CITES is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) had worked in Jumla and Mugu districts, increasing local incomes and healthcare for harvesters and establishing effective conservation of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). The project was scaled-up to five districts (Humla, Mugu, Jumla, Bajhangh and Darchula), incorporating four additional high-value mountain NTFPs under the project “Himalayan Plants for People: Sustainable Trade for Biodiversity and Development.” The objectives of the project are to continue the goals of “Succeeding with CITES” in the Himalayan region through sustainable management and traceable, equitable trade, based on clear legal frameworks and sustainable use and trade approaches. The project works closely with the Nepalese government to operationalize CITES trade controls for medicinal and aromatic plants, and to provide training on production quality, value-addition, and the FairWild Standard to 2,000 jatamansi harvesters.¹ It is being implemented by the Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources (ANSAB), who coordinated our travel. (For more information about TRAFFIC, ANSAB, and other partners’ work in Nepal, especially about the work to amend the CITES Act of Nepal to enable legal and sustainable trade of jatamansi, see the webinar “Meet the Jatamansi Producers: Succeeding with CITES — Sustainable and Equitable Jatamansi Trade from Nepal.”⁶)

Jatamansi grows naturally throughout the Himalayan mountains and is primarily collected from the wild. Jatamansi root is harvested and distilled to produce spikenard essential oil, which is important in the global aromatherapy and perfume industry. Commercial demand for the root, which is mostly exported to India and, to a lesser extent, China, for use in Ayurvedic, Tibetan, and Chinese medicine, threatens existing populations. The species is slow growing, prefers a specific habitat, has low population density, and has had limited success in cultivation, all of which contribute to the threats for its survival.⁷ It is listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and has been listed in CITES Appendix II since 1997.^8,^b The goal of the TRAFFIC project is to help protect wild ecosystems and improve local livelihoods through wild-collection activities.

Because of washed-out roads from late rains which also disrupted flights, we were not able to reach Jumla, where the program was introduced in 2018. Instead, we changed our plans to visit a community in Bajhang district in far western Nepal that is part of the second phase of the project and so is in the first year of implementation. With this, our focus shifted from documenting the impact of the project to exploring the issues and challenges in sourcing and producing jatamansi, and how the project attempts to address those challenges. We were not able to observe the actual work of the project in the communities on the ground and so this article does not speak to the impacts it has had to date.

Wholesale Trade

We first visited two processing centers in Nepalgunj in the Banke district of Nepal. Nepalgunj, one of the hottest places in Nepal, is a dry, dusty town in the Terai region in western Nepal and is a trade gateway between the Himalayas and India. The sky was hazy with pollution. Regional traders bring unprocessed raw medicinal plant material that they have purchased either from wild harvesters or farmers to regional and national level wholesalers in Nepalgunj. These traders sell some raw material to the domestic processing industry, but most is exported along the old trade routes into India where regional wholesalers in Delhi, Lucknow, and Kolkata in turn sell the material to buyers in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. (For additional details about the Nepalese medicinal plant production network, see Fold et al [2023].²)

“It’s a black box,” Smith-Hall explained to us. “Spikenard (jatamansi) is mentioned in the Bible, so to speak. And it only comes from the Himalayas, right? So, it has been traded for at least a few thousand years, but no one has ever done a consumer survey to look at the actual distribution of this product into different consumer products, which is important to understand. Because if we want to be able to predict what might drive the demand in the future, then we need to understand where the raw material ends up…. But no one has ever looked at these regional wholesalers [to understand where they sell the jatamansi]. And the wholesalers are not going to share that information anyway. So, we have very little understanding of what actually drives the trade. We only know it has been there for a long time.”

Shorter Supply Networks

Khilendra Gurung, the manager for Himalayan Bio Trade (HBTL), the first certified FairWild producer company, works under a different model, he explained when we met with him in Kathmandu. The company works directly with the collectors. They maintain a register of each collector and each household. They record how much that household collects, when they collect, and how much they are fairly paid. HBTL analyzes the market price for the species, adds a small amount, and then they pay the 5% fair trade premium on top of that. The community then uses that 5% premium for social activities, health care, education, as well as in the sustainable management of the forest and other programs.^c

This direct model with collector groups is the model that the TRAFFIC program is trying to support.^d

Jatamansi Harvest

We drove 15 hours over the next day and a half to a small essential oil processing center below the village of Majyun, in Bungal Municipality, that will receive funding through the Himalayan Plants for People project to upgrade its capacity and facilities to be able to provide higher quality essential oils more consistently. The processing facility was on the edge of the river valley we had driven alongside for hours. We filmed the essential oil processing process, ate a meal of red rice and dal, and then hiked up three hours to the village, which we reached after dark.

The following morning, I joined a group of 20 villagers to hike three more hours to the high-altitude (13,000 feet or so) pastures where villagers collected jatamansi and other wild plants.

When we arrived at the pasture, four or five of the villagers immediately and efficiently began to dig jatamansi roots. Like so many site visits, though it had taken months of planning and days of travel to reach the collection area, the actual demonstration of the harvest was rather anti-climactic. There was little to see. After less than an hour, Nabin Raj Joshi, the Forestry and Climate Change Expert for ANSAB who had joined us on the trip, came to where I was filming, pointed to the sky, which had become much darker, said rain was on the way and that we had to head back. We tried to quickly fly the drone that we brought to capture video, but it was too windy. And so, we turned around and headed back to the village.

It began to snow quite heavily and then thunder and lightning began. One of the villagers found a cave, others gathered wood from the forest and built a roaring fire so we could get warm. We cooked potatoes in the coals, and then we continued two more hours down to the village.

Managing Access

The village manages access to this pasture through the Community Forest User Group (CFUG), a key management regime/feature of forest resources in Nepal. This village was comprised of 20 or so households, all of whom are related, and management of the community forest was fairly straightforward. In other communities where the population is more diverse and includes migrants to the region, management decisions can be more difficult.

The greatest challenge this community faces in managing harvesting of the medicinal plants from this pasture is outsiders passing through the pastures in May and June on their way further north to harvest the highly valuable Chinese caterpillar fungus. On their return south, these outsiders harvest other valuable wild plants, including jatamansi, from the pastures they pass through even though they do not have permission to do so. They also harvest firewood, putting more pressure on forest resources overall. Because of the jatamansi collection area’s distance from the village, it is difficult for community members to monitor or manage this harvest by outsiders.

The following morning, we interviewed villagers about their experiences wild collecting medicinal plants for sale and their hopes and expectations for the future.

Dhurba Bahadur Dhami, the chairperson of the Eakchale community forest, described how he had gone to collect wild plants with his father as a young boy while watching the sheep. Each plant had its season, Dhami explained. Traders came to the village to buy the dried plants, but he did not know where they sold them. He spent around 35 days each year harvesting medicinal plants during his youth. The hardest part was determining the rates to sell to the traders. With the CFUG, they now have a system for managing the harvest, and there are now more plants in the managed forests, he said. They decide as a group how many days to harvest. Families in the village do not have enough land to provide food for the year and so harvesting and selling medicinal plants provides them with the money to buy additional food.

We also spoke with two younger women who joined the harvest, Nanda Kumari Dhami and Kamala Kumari Dhami. They were both studying away from the village and came home for the Hindu festivals Dashain and Tihar. Nanda Kumari, who is in her third year studying agriculture, said she would like to return to the village, but it is so remote and there is no one here from whom to learn and with whom to work were she to return. “Where you are born is always best,” she said. “Working with your whole family, sisters and brothers, is always better. But there isn’t enough arable land in the village without stones nor enough fertilizer,” she said. And so, she will look for work elsewhere when she graduates.

We then headed back two hours down to the processing unit, and into a Jeep for the 14-hour return trip to Dhangadhi where we caught a flight back to Kathmandu the next evening.

ANSAB

Like any initiative, the complexity of the medicinal plant trade in Nepal paints a challenging background for the conservation and development project. Especially in the early phase of project implementation, it can be difficult to see what difference a small, certified chain might make when so much of the trade is illegal and goes to markets in India and China where consumers are not asking questions about social and environmental impacts.

Like with other certifications, though, the social and cultural impacts are not always the most obvious.^9,^e Nabin Raj Joshi from ANSAB explained that FairWild is giving an incentive for villagers to practice what they already know. ANSAB, he added, is helping to systemize the knowledge about harvesting practices that is not being passed down.

“Working in such remote areas is difficult,” he said. “But this is the high time to work in these communities, otherwise the resources that we have now, they might disappear or become extinct in a decade or something. So, we might not only lose the species but also the livelihood of the people.” ANSAB’s aim, he explained, is to build the capacity of the local communities and to make them aware so that, once they have the knowledge and the capacity, they can manage these resources on their own.

Puspa Ghimire, the program director for ANSAB, echoed Nabin’s comments. From his perspective, the most important part of this FairWild project is that it links the biological part and the human side with the supply chain and offers a vehicle to manage the forest and address rural livelihoods.

Challenges and Questions

As Bhishma Subedi, executive director of ANSAB, said in our closing meeting, visiting source communities provides an “un-cottoning” — an opportunity to look below the surface and understand how the big picture objectives most companies claim to aspire to (transparency, equity, traceability, sustainability) are playing out in specific regional and national circumstances.

But implementing this vision is not easy, especially in a country like Nepal. Khilendra outlined what he sees as the main problems.

Shortage of skilled labor

Sourcing the raw material in the main challenge. People do not want to do hard work, Khilendra told us, echoing what a producer company working in Appalachia told me. And more importantly, he said, skilled people do not want to stay in the village.

We heard this message everywhere. Samir Newa, the founder and managing director of The Organic Valley Pvt. Ltd., told us that there used to be a network of wild collectors in villages across the country who collected what Tibetan and Ayurvedic doctors needed. These collectors knew how to collect in the right way at the right time. But those people have all left, he said. Now the only people in villagers are ones with no other options. For them, wild collection is just about making money and making sure their family has enough to eat.

Instability of global markets

The second challenge is the instability of the market. “We can’t predict what the market will want,” Khilendra said. “This year there is demand for one product. The next year we expect the same demand, but then it isn’t there. That is a challenge.”

Producers and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Nepal are interested in private voluntary certifications like FairWild, organic, and Fair for Life to gain access to a global market that is committed to ethical sourcing. Producer groups in these countries have high expectations of what certifications will bring. Yet, the primary market for jatamansi is India, where there is limited awareness of its threatened status or concern overall about the social and ecological impacts of the commercial demand for medicinal plants. The project is addressing the challenge of finding premium buyers by bringing buyers and producers together in a matchmaking event in June 2023 in Kathmandu.

Accessibility

It is very difficult, time consuming, and expensive to reach the rural areas from which many medicinal plants are sourced. And yet, implementing a certification like FairWild requires monitoring, forest management plans, and ongoing interaction with the CFUGs. ANSAB’s approach is to find individuals in rural areas to take on management and implementation responsibilities. But, as Khilendra said, skilled people typically leave rural areas where facilities are so limited. In turn, it can be challenging to find qualified program staff who live in urban areas who are willing to put up with the rigors of field research in rural Nepal.

Costs of certifications

Finally, almost everyone we spoke to in Nepal mentioned that there are too many certifications at too high a cost that typically has to be borne by the producer groups.^f

What Can Be Done

As a result of Khilendra’s comments (and those of other producer groups), I organized two Sustainable Herbs Initiative webinars looking at how voluntary certifications and standards are evolving to address the challenges I observed in Nepal. In the first webinar, speakers from standard setting organizations discussed certifications as one tool among others. The conversation itself, the openness with which the speakers addressed the gaps between theory and practice and their commitment to addressing those gaps, gave me as much hope as any specific strategies they outlined. Trust, collaboration, and good communication emerged as some of the key practices moving forward.

Khilendra was a speaker in the second webinar, Certifications as a Tool for Sustainable Sourcing: The Perspectives of Producers. Highlights from that conversation can be found here.

^a Other partners include ProFound – Advisers in Development, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, FairWild Foundation, the IUCN/SSC Medicinal Plant Specialist Group, and Department of Food and Resource Economics, and the University of Copenhagen.

^b Species listed in CITES Appendix II are not currently threatened with extinction but may become threatened if trade is not closely monitored.

^c Because we were unable to reach Jumla, we were unable to meet with the collector groups with whom Himalayan BioTrade has established relationships.

^dIt is beyond the scope of this article, but the impacts of shortening supply networks or removing certain actors may potentially impact supplier relationships in unanticipated ways. Fold et al (2023) found a high degree of horizontal cooperation among local traders and what they refer to as “sub-local traders,” and these local and sub-local traders often provide credit and advance payments to harvesters. They write, “Any interventions to eliminate generalist sub-local traders — for example, to increase harvester margins, make trade more transparent through the use of cash payments and contracts, or initiatives to ensure more stable supplies for domestic processing industries — could thus erode rural household access to credit in kind.” They also found that harvesters in some cases receive a higher share of regional wholesaler purchasing prices than previously thought.

^e As mentioned, this article does not discuss the impacts of the project in Jumla, Humla, Darchula, and Mugu districts. TRAFFIC’s Anastasiya Timoshyna outlined some impacts of the project: “In the first phase of the project, over 10,000 hectares of forest and meadows in the Mugu and Jumla districts of Nepal were brought under improved management, benefitting over 2,000 harvesters, 44% of whom were women. In addition, the CFUG operational management plans were updated,” she wrote. Additional details about the Himalayan Plants for People program are available online.⁸

^f As a result of these conversations, SHP is hosting a series of two webinars focusing precisely on these questions of how certifications are evolving to address these challenges and a second looking from the perspective of the producer groups. Khilendra Gurung is a speaker in the second of these. Recordings and highlights of the webinars can be found on SHP’s website: https://sustainableherbsprogram.org/certifications/.

Image credits (top to bottom):

The view from Majyun in Bungal Municipality, Nepal
Jatamansi leaf. ©2023 Steven Foster Group
Drying jatamansi
Clearing the roads after a landslide
The author interviews employees at Nepalgunj facility
Driving in Nepal
Dhurba Bahadur Dhami harvests jatamansi
Kamala Kumari Dhami (left) and Nanda Kumari Dhami (right)
Packing bags of dried jatamansi at a drying facility
On the trail to the harvesting site
Nabin Raj Joshi gives a presentation on FairWild in the field

References

Succeeding with CITES: New project aims to promote sustainable wild Jatamansi trade from Nepal [press release]. Cambridge, UK: TRAFFIC; October 18, 2018. Available at: www.traffic.org/news/succeeding-with-cites-new-project-aims-to-promote-sustainable-wild-jatamansi-trade-from-nepal/. Accessed January 24, 2023.
Himalayan Plants for People: Sustainable Trade for Biodiversity and Development. ANSAB website. Available at: https://ansab.org.np/projects/himalayan-plants-for-people–sustainable-trade-for-biodiversity-and-development. Accessed February 15, 2023.
Fold N, Pyakurel D, Pouliot M, Smith-Hall C. Global production networks and medicinal plants: Upstream actor dynamics in Nepal. The Geographical Journal. 2023;00:1-14. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12508. Accessed February 2, 2023.
Smith-Olsen C, Helles F. Market efficiency and benefit distribution in medicinal plant markets: Empirical evidence from South Asia. International Journal of Biodiversity Science and Management. 2009;5(2):53-62. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17451590903063129. Accessed February 2, 2023.
Mckenna JM. Strategic Segmentation Analysis: Nepal: Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (English). Washington, DC: World Bank Group website. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/496421556737648658/Medicinal-and-Aromatic-Plants. Accessed February 14, 2023.
Meet the Jatamansi Producers: Succeeding with CITES — Sustainable and Equitable Jatamansi Trade from Nepal [webinar]. March 24, 2021. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpK0vjC9JUo. Accessed February 2, 2023.
Chauhan HK, Oli S, Bisht AK, et al. Review of the biology, uses and conservation of the critically endangered endemic Himalayan species Nardostachys jatamansi (Caprifoliaceae). Biodivers Conserv. 2021;30:3315–3333. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-021-02269-6. Accessed February 2, 2023.
Schindler C, Heral E, Drinkwater E, et al. 2022. WildCheck — Assessing risks and opportunities of trade in wild plant ingredients. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Available at: https://www.fao.org/3/cb9267en/cb9267en.pdf. Accessed January 25, 2023.
Smith-Hall C, Timoshyna A, Leaman DJ. Himalayan Plants for People: Sustainable trade for biodiversity and development. Research Gate website. Available at: www.researchgate.net/project/Himalayan-plants-for-people-sustainable-trade-for-biodiversity-and-development. Accessed February 15, 2023.
Managing Nepal’s urban transition. The World Bank. April 1, 2013. Available at: www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/04/01/managing-nepals-urban-transition. Accessed January 25, 2023.
Salazar N, Acharya P, Kerr S. The World Cup Is Ending, but the Migrant Labor Economy Grinds On. The New York Times. December 12, 2022. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/sports/world-cup-migrant-workers.html. Accessed January 25, 2023.