Industry roles in medicinal plant conservation - the case of Pukka Herbs

Highlights

• The company has co-ordinated its efforts in favour of ecological sustainability on top of a primary interest in ensuring high quality for the botanical ingredients of its ayurvedic preparations. As with ecological sustainability, assurance of high herbal quality requires that plant materials be traceable back to their places of origin.


• Short supply chains make it easier to achieve traceability and have contact with growers and harvesters.


• Security of resource ownership is essential for developing improved management practices for medicinal plants.


• Sustainability is usually defined differently for wild-collected plant resources than for agricultural systems. In the present example, medicinal plants from forest gardens (intermediate between natural habitats and agricultural systems) were treated as being wild for the purpose of developing sustainable harvesting systems, but were considered to be cultivated for the purpose of organic certification.


• The company recognises the need for sustainability guidelines for the harvesting and managing of each species of wild medicinal plant. These have to be workable according to local social, economic and ecological circumstances. The harvesting guidelines currently being used by the company are based on rapid assessments by foresters and have been drawn conservatively.

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Traceability, supply chains and certification

This is the story of one company’s efforts to source its herbal ingredients from sustainable sources, according to its own account. Pukka Herbs, founded in the UK in 1999, imports plant materials from India and Sri Lanka for the manufacture of ayurvedic preparations. In an interview with Alan Hamilton of Plantlife International, Sebastian Pole, co-founder of Pukka Herbs, emphasised his company’s interest in providing high quality health-giving products. Sebastian believes that organic production can be a key to such quality assurance. As with ecological sustainability, verification of organic status requires traceability back to the source areas of the plants, so that Pukka Herbs has a prima-facie motivation to establish traceability.

Pukka Herbs does not buy raw plant materials directly from individual farmers or collectors (which would be a hard task for all but the smallest manufacturers), but does have close relationships with producer companies that work closely with farmers. Pukka does try to restrain the length of its supply chains (which tend to be extensive in the herbal business). Long supply chains, with many intermediate traders between producers and manufacturers, compound the difficulties of tracing the movements of plant materials. They make it difficult for manufacturers to verify that adequate ‘production quality’ has been achieved for any of the quality categories in which they might be interested – ecological sustainability, product quality (such as organic) and fair trade.

A maximum of three trade links separates Pukka Herbs from the producers of the medicinal plants and usually only two. Pukka purchases plant materials from exporting companies in India and Sri Lanka, that either buy these materials directly from the producers or else buy them from intermediate companies that themselves are directly connected, viz.:

PRODUCER – (SOMETIMES) INTERMEDIATE TRADER – EXPORTING COMPANY – PUKKA HERBS

Pukka’s ability to achieve traceability for its raw materials, as well as required standards of organic production, has been recognised by the Soil Association, with Pukka’s products certified as organic to EU and US standards (the latter under the National Organic Program). Field certification was by the certifiers SKAL and ECOCERT, their certification being passed on to the Soil Association through recognition of standards’ equivalence. Certification was to the normal organic standard of the Soil Association (used mainly for cultivated plants) and not to according to its Organic Wild Crafting Standard, which has more stringent sustainability requirements relating specifically to wild plants.

Principles of ‘production quality’ and their sharing

Pukka’s relationships with a few exporting companies in India and Sri Lanka are central to its business. These exporters are reported by Pukka Herbs to be ecologically and ethically minded agricultural companies that purchase crops from farmers, as well as providing them with training, advice, seeds and fair-trade relationships. Pukka’s trading partners were not involved in some of the more specialised Ayurvedic medicinal plants prior to their relationships with Pukka.

Pukka Herbs is committed through its business principles to high quality in three aspects of production: high quality ingredients from the medicinal perspective, ecological sustainability and fair trade.

As regards sustainability, Pukka Herbs has its own working document on standards and guidelines to guide its efforts to achieving sustainable harvest. This document is based closely on the standards of the Soil Association, covering both cultivated and wild plants. Special emphasis is placed on the need for management systems for wild plants to be adaptive, allowing rapid and appropriate response to changing circumstances.

The social agenda of Pukka Herbs aims to enhance the livelihoods of the producers of the medicinal plants through enhancing their autonomy. Specific objectives are to develop long-term relationships with the producers (including for the promotion of sustainable production practices and long-term planning), the payment of premium prices that include the cost of sustainable production, the provision of technical assistance and advice, the encouragement or strengthening of community groups for self-empowerment, and the promotion of local markets for organic production (to spread the risks to the producers, so that they are not uniquely bound to Pukka Herbs for market access).

Pukka’s business principles must be shared by its business partners in India and Sri Lanka, if they are to be carried into effect. It is these business partners that can give field reality to Pukka’s own objectives, which, in the sustainability arena, include the establishment of systems of sustainable harvesting for wild plants, the training of farmers in organic agriculture and assistance for the establishment of nurseries (whether to produce seedlings for field crops or for enrichment planting in the wild).

Pukka Herbs has developed memoranda of understanding (MOU) with its business partners regarding intentions, aspirations and operating standards, covering:

• Organic farming standards
• Commitment to fair trade
• Medicinal plant quality
• Processing standards
• Attainment of Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP).

Pukka Herbs undertakes an annual exercise in relationship building, technical auditing and quality inspection at randomly selected growing and processing areas to ensure that the terms of the MOU are being met. Relationships are being built ‘inclusively’, recognising that current practices are not perfect, but rather ‘work-in-progress’. The company reports that, with a willingness to learn and a spirit of co-operation, steady progress is proving possible, year-by-year.

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The forest gardens of Sri Lanka

Most of the plant materials purchased by Pukka Herbs are actually derived from field crops, rather than wild plants. Of course, there are benefits for plant conservation from organic agriculture, but the parts of Pukka’s business most strongly relevant to wider plant conservation are two cases of harvesting wild or semi-wild plants in Sri Lanka. One of these involves the production of medicinal plants in ‘forest gardens’ and the other the collection of medicinal plants from natural habitats. The exceptional plant conservation interests here are the possibilities of conserving natural populations of plants with their genetic diversity and ecological connections, and opportunities to provide incentives for the conservation of natural or semi-natural habitats containing a diversity of plants.

The forest (or home) gardens of Sri Lanka are famous for their plant diversity, with a total of more than 400, mostly indigenous, species of woody plants recorded. These gardens are tended patches of vegetation of intermediate status between fully wild and fully domesticated. Found in all climatic parts of the island – from the wet rainforest regions of the southwest and centre to the drier wooded savannas of the north and east – the forest gardens of Sri Lanka are economically important to the nation, being the source of 41 per cent of its saw-logs and 26 per cent of its biofuel (Ariyadasa 2002; FSMP 1995). They contain a large number of medicinal plants, including the scrambler Asparagus racemosus, the small shrub Munronia pinnata, the large climbers Coscinum fenestratum and Tinospora cordifolia, and the trees Strychnos nux-vomica and Syzygium cumini.

For the purposes of judging ecological sustainability, a choice must be made for the forest gardens as whether to regard them as cultivated or wild. Sustainability can be judged very differently in the two cases. As typically defined, sustainable agriculture refers to a quite different set of required criteria to sustainability for a wild plant resource. Sustainable agriculture primarily requires maintenance of the basic quality of the land, particularly as regards the quality of the soil, and there is no special need for continuing production of any particular crop in a particular field. In contrast, sustainability with reference to a wild plant resource typically requires that the resource re-grows – most stringently defined as reforming at a rate at least as fast as its rate of extraction (click here for more information).

For the purposes of resource management (as opposed to certification requirements), Pukka Herbs decided to regard the forest gardens as wild rather than cultivated (an excellent decision from the wider plant conservation perspective). There then ensued questions about how to ensure that the management and harvesting of medicinal plants in these gardens conformed to standards required for sustainability.

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Developing management systems for the forest gardens

Garden ownership, allowable off-take and enrichment planting were among matters that required addressing to establish satisfactory systems of garden management for sustainability. On ownership, it is widely recognised that a key requirement for proper management of a natural resource is security of rights over its use. For example, the Organic Wild Crafting Standard of the Soil Association requires the designation of a responsible manager for each production area. When Pukka Herbs turned its attention to the forest gardens, it discovered that many were not legally registered, creating an obstacle for certification and possibly also for good management.

A lack of legal title for land or plant resources is a common condition in many developing countries and does not necessarily imply a lack of proper management. Customary rules that are publicly respected can also convey the necessary degree of recognised authority. However, in this case, Pukka Herbs, in association with a producing partner (Lanka Organics), considered it necessary to devote considerable effort to getting the land registered, so that the farmers then legally owned the land and their produce could be certified as organic.

The approach taken to setting levels of off-take for the forest gardens was to request officers from the Forest Department to set annual quotas for each species to be harvested, based on discussions with the producer companies and the farmers, and judgements of the levels at which they could be sustainably harvested in particular gardens. These estimates were rule-of-thumb assessments, based on fairly casual observations of the abundance of the species and general knowledge of their ecologies. No precise measurements were made of the amounts of the species present or of their rates of regeneration or re-growth. In view of the many uncertainties, the levels of allowable off-take were set conservatively, following the precautionary principle. The Forest Department undertakes annual inspections to verify adherence to the set harvesting levels.

The owners of the forest gardens were encouraged to establish small nurseries of some valuable medicinal plants to produce seedlings for enrichment planting. Criteria for species selection included appropriateness for growing in particular climatic regions, saleability and price. Only local and indigenous species were used, examples including Phyllanthus emblica, Piper longum and Tinospora cordifolia.

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Harvesting medicinal plants from natural habitats

The other example of special relevance for wider plant conservation is also in Sri Lanka and concerns the harvesting of medicinal plants in an area of natural forest. The site, near the town of Bibile in the ‘intermediate’ climatic zone of Sri Lanka, had earlier been chosen as one of five representative Medicinal Plant Conservation Areas (MPCA) in Sri Lanka by a project of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). The MPCA at Bibile consists of a core forested area and a surrounding zone with farms. During its period of involvement, the IUCN project started to develop systems of sustainable harvesting for medicinal plants in buffer zones of the forest, as well as inaugurating a medicinal plant demonstration garden and involving around 50 local farmers in medicinal plant production. However, linkages to the market were poor and, as its project came to an end, IUCN requested Lanka Organics in partnership with Pukka Herbs to see whether it could assist the initiatives that it had started to continue and be developed. As a consequence, Lanka Organics, a local business associate of Pukka, has helped some local farmers to achieve certified organic production of medicinal plants and assisted in the development of sustainable harvesting systems for a few species of wild medicinal trees. The species selected for sustainable wild production are all plants in which it is the fruits that are required by the medicinal trade, making over-harvesting less of a worry than it would be, for example, if it was roots that were needed. They include Phyllanthus emblica, Terminalia cheluba and T. bellirica.

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Possible future steps

This case study raises questions about how best to develop practical management and harvest guidelines for each species of medicinal plant harvested from natural vegetation at a particular location. Detailed information on the abundance, regeneration and re-growth rates of harvested species has either been unavailable or not of practical use, either in the case of the forest gardens or at Bibile. Rather, the approach used has been to set conservative limits to the types or amounts of products allowed for harvest, based on rule-of-thumb estimates of species abundance and recovery rates, and the likely damage likely to be incurred to the plants through collection. Species- and site-specific collection guidelines may be further developed.

A related issue is about how far quantitative rigour is required or possible for the certification of wild-collected medicinal plants as sustainable. In the present case, organic certification was achieved without the need for a high degree of quantitative rigour in resource assessment or monitoring. Conservation organisations have recently been giving increased thought to certification schemes for sustainability, sometimes requiring many measurements and observations on the status of medicinal species and their habitats to achieve certification. On the other hand, the herbal and botanical sectors are beset with increasing amounts of regulations, compliance with which can be especially difficult for smaller companies, and there are also the challenges of finding finance and expertise required for sophisticated schemes. The challenge of developing workable systems for certifying sustainable wild collection remains.

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The origin of the case study

This case study was written by Alan Hamilton of Plantlife International in October 2005, based on information received from Pukka Herbs, including through interview. The information received from Pukka Herbs has not been verified independently by Plantlife International, but we consider it credible.

References

Ariyadasa, K.P (2002). Assessment of tree resources in the home gardens of Sri Lanka. Forestry Department, Sri Lanka. FAO Corporate Document Repository.

FSMP (1995). Forestry Sector Master Plan of Sri Lanka. Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Forestry, Sri Lanka.

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