Forest Products, Livelihoods and Conservation

68 Achieving a fair and sustainable trade in devil’s claw (Harpagophytum spp.)

claw has been enhanced regional collaboration between range states, and

increased efforts are being made to harmonise policies, standardise the

monitoring of trade and harvesting and improve enforcement of regulations.

This will not only lead to improved conservation of the resource, but will also

enhance the bargaining power of producers and exporters.

Livelihoods and benefit-sharing

The importance of sustainable use is not only ecological given that the

harvesting of devil’s claw represents an extremely important survival strategy

for some of the most marginalized communities in southern Africa. Both

mismanagement of the resource and domestication will have negative

ramifications for those harvesting from the wild. While trends towards enhanced

management of the resource will support sustained trade in wild-crafted

material, range states have an important role to play in ensuring that

domestication strategies are locally appropriate, do not jeopardise local

livelihoods and spread the benefits as widely as possible. Steps are needed to

pool and share existing knowledge on cultivation, for the benefit of the industry

as a whole. One of the most startling aspects of the study is the wholesale

lack of involvement of nationals from range states in research and development

activities, and in cultivation projects in particular.

A key issue raised by this case concerns the negligible benefits procured by

range states through trade in devil’s claw. At the community level, direct

financial benefits rarely exceed 0.85% of the retail price, and typically comprise

only 0.4%. Local exporters usually obtain only 0.2% to 0.4% of the retail price.

Although there are obvious costs involved in the processing and marketing of

the imported product, in reality the trade is monopolised by a small cohort of

international companies and increased profits (or favourable changes in

exchange rates) are seldom passed down the chain to producers. In a similar

vein, processing activities take place almost exclusively in Europe, and the

bulk of material is exported in a raw and largely unprocessed form. Although

some companies are now seeking to redress this and to build value-adding

facilities in the region to undertake additional processing steps such as milling,

grinding, crushing and extraction, there is as yet no demonstrable evidence of

real commitment. Of significance is that foreigners hold virtually all the existing

patents for the processing of devil’s claw.

Finally, the lack of tenure security for communities harvesting devil’s claw

remains an unresolved issue requiring attention by range states. This is an

essential component of any strategy aimed at ensuring a more sustainable

and equitable trade in devil’s claw.

Trade

Continued growth in demand for Harpagophytum-based products is likely, in

keeping with the past five to six years which have seen a three- to six-fold

increase in amounts traded. These trends parallel those of the

phytotherapeutics market in general over the past decade and can be attributed

to a growing interest in ‘natural’ biological alternatives to chemical-based

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