Plants for life: - Sacred Seeds Sanctuary

NGO representatives but mostimportantly the rural populations ofpeople living near wild medicinal plantpopulations. Preferable methodologieswill improve the understanding of impactson the livelihoods of the poor of bothharvesting medicinal plants and ofmeasures to ensure the conservation andsustainable use of medicinal plants.Community-based conservationworkBotanic gardens are increasingly involvedin the development, implementation andsupport of local, community-basedprojects, for example using collections tosupport local initiatives in primaryhealthcare.Medicinal plant conservation is aboutplant resources, hence emphasising theidea of conservation not for conservation’ssake but for the conservation of resourcesfor use (Hamilton, pers.comm.).Community-based conservationemphasises the things about these plantsthat give people drive to do somethingabout them i.e. concerns about health,money (income generation) and cultures(important religious elements, heritageprotection). Recent forestry research hasshown that, when their rights arerecognised, communities are moreeffective at protecting forests thannational parks (Rights and ResourcesInitiative, 2007).However, response strategies designed toprovide incentives for biodiversityconservation by ensuring that local peoplebenefit from one or more component ofbiodiversity (such as products from asingle species) have proved very difficultto implement (MEA, 2005).Lophophora williamsii, used ritually inMexico for thousands of years.Community-based conservation musttherefore be integrated with developmentat every level; from village to region toworld. A wide range of stakeholdersmust be engaged from the start; fromscientists to traders to government andThe Etnobotanica Paraguay project, runby the Conservatoire et JardinBotaniques de la Ville de Geneve, isresearching the use of local medicinalplants and running targeted educationcampaigns to encourage the use andprotection of appropriate species, aswell as setting up community gardensand looking at the best application ofthe plants.Malabar Botanic Garden in India ispromoting the cultivation of the state’snative medicinal plants, by giving trainingin relevant techniques to local farmers.Guidance is given on the medicinalplants‘ cultivation, storage and trade.In the last two years over 200 farmershave been trained, and a farmer’s societyhas been formed to share knowledgeand to promote the mass cultivation andtrade of medicinal plants. This hasprovided a valuable opportunity for thesefarmers to expand and diversify theircrops, safeguarding their incomes.At Nature Palace Botanic Garden inUganda the Poverty Alleviation andHealth Promotion through Conservationproject engaged 50 subsistencefarmers who are now cultivating raremedicinal plants for income generation.The farmers have formed anAssociation (the Kasanje Conservationand Development Association), which isnow engaged in a drive to recruit morefarmers (D. Nkwanga, pers.comm.).North Carolina Botanic Garden andthe North Carolina Department ofAgriculture collaborated on a project tomark Dionea muscipula plants growingin the wild. Roots are painted with adye that glows under ultra-violet light,enabling the identification of wildharvested specimens. This is proving adeterrent to would-be poachers, whoplucked thousands of Venus fly-trapsfrom the protected Green Swamp areain a single afternoon in 2005 (NatureConservancy, 2006).Aburi Botanical Garden in Ghana inpartnership with BGCI, the UNEPWorld Conservation Monitoring Centre,the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburghand the University of Ghana ran theConservation and Sustainable Use ofMedicinal plants in Ghana project. Thisproject aimed to improve communities’access to medicinal plants, and toencourage their sustainable use. It setup a 50 acre model Medicinal PlantGarden, based on community ethnobotanicalsurveys, which was plantedwith 1,361 medicinal plant seedlings,and also set up a plant nursery to hold5,000 medicinal plant seedlings fordistribution to herbalists.The National Botanic Garden ofBelguim works closely with KisantuBotanic Garden in the Congo both oncommunity education and thepropagation of medicinal plants fordistribution (Rammello, pers.comm).Plants for life: Medicinal plant conservation and botanic gardens 19