conservation.’^79 A plea for a global effort directed to the preservation of
medicinal plants was issued jointly in 1988 by the WHO, the World Wide
Fund for Nature (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature (IUCN). Known as the Chiang Mai Declaration, after the city in
which the first WHO/IUCN/WWF International Consultation on the
Conservation of Medicinal Plants took place, it called upon WHA member
states to ‘Save the plants that save lives’.
Twenty years later, Africa’s fragile oral knowledge systems are threatened
by war, famine, political instability and urbanisation (with concomitant loss
of the ‘ecosystem generation’). Unsustainable harvesting practices, delib-
erate habitat destruction and climate change threaten the survival of the
plant species on which Africa’s traditional healers depend. The greatest
threat to traditional medical practice, however, is the burgeoning global
population, whose growth and consumption of natural resources places
plant diversity at risk in most parts of the world. The quantity of wild plant
material exported from Africa and destined for the international pharma-
ceutical trade is enormous, but pales into insignificance compared with that
required by the trade in crude drugs used in traditional medical practice,
within individual states or across regional borders. Stimulated by high
population growth rates, rapid urbanisation, rural unemployment and the
value placed on TMs, national and regional commercial trade in TMs is
now greater than at any time in the past.
Formerly most TPs gathered their own materia medica, but in an increas-
ingly urbanised and commercialised world this is no longer possible. As a
result, a niche has arisen for collectors who often travel long distances to
procure plant or animal medicinals for sale to vendors or TPs, for export or
for their own use.^70 In African countries with large urban populations, medic-
inal plant use has changed from being a purely specialist activity of TPs to one
involving an informal sector group of medicinal plant gatherers and vendors.
Unlike rural TPs who gather plant material in small quantities, commercial
gatherers are motivated primarily by profit. This has resulted in a disregard
for traditional conservation practices and ‘an opportunistic scramble for the
last bag of bark, bulbs or roots’. High rates of unemployment and low levels
of formal education have also given rise to an increasing number of medicinal
plant vendors, plying their trade in the marketplace (Figure 5.9).80,81
The link between local poverty and over-collection of many medicinal
plants from the wild must be taken into account when formulating conser-
vation strategies. Suggested measures for the conservation of African plant
species used as TMs include:
- Empowering local people to protect their natural resources, e.g.
establishment of community nurseries for the cultivation of popular
TMs, for sale or consumption
112 | Traditional medicine