Shea, argan, licorice, and more: Behind products like lotion, shampoos, and tea, complex supply chains hide environmental and social risks.
The chocolate you eat, the moisturizer you use, the tea you drink—these everyday products contain ingredients from wild plants. The way those plants—many of them threatened—are harvested may be damaging the environment and exploiting workers, a recent report found.
The UN-affiliated report by wildlife trade experts highlights 12 plants: frankincense, shea, Brazil nut, juniper, licorice, baobab, argan, candelilla, pygeum, jatamansi, gum arabic, and goldenseal.
Plant derivatives in household products often have “flown under the radar,” says Caitlin Schindler, lead author of the report and a project manager at Traffic, a nonprofit that monitors the sustainability of the wildlife trade. They “sit there somewhere in the middle of the ingredients list” on product labels. Even if consumers notice ingredient names, there’s no information about what’s involved in obtaining or processing them.
For example, about 20,000 Brazilians’ income depends directly or indirectly on the harvesting of Brazil nuts, which are one of the most widely consumed tree nuts in the world and are vulnerable to extinction. Entire families often come from neighboring regions to harvest the nuts, living in temporary forest camps, which provide poor shelter and no access to clean water. Here, workers risk being stung by scorpions, struck by heavy falling fruit, and attacked by jaguars. After the nuts are sold, importing countries profit, marking up the price about 2.5 times, even though no further processing is required.
Many plants identified in the report—published in April by Traffic, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Medicinal Plant Specialist Group with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—are threatened with extinction. The main threats are overharvesting, invasive pests and disease, climate change, and habitat loss. As with Brazil nuts, harvesting plants for their ingredients may involve child labor and violations of workers’ rights, according to the report. Many of those who do the harvesting are poor, female, and live in marginalized rural areas.
Diana Marques, NGM Staff Source: United Nations Comtrade
The IUCN has never assessed the conservation status of more than 20,000 regularly traded plant species, which means it’s impossible to know whether their use is sustainable, the report says.
Meanwhile, trade in wild plants—for aromatherapy, natural medicine, food supplements, and natural beauty products—is booming. U.S. consumers spent more than $11 billion on herbal dietary supplements in 2020—up more than 17 percent from 2019. Plants such as licorice are used in herbal preventatives and remedies for COVID-19, and bark from the soap bark tree, in Chile, is used in the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine.
Local communities have used wild plants—frankincense in Somalia, Brazil nuts in South America, baobab powder in southern Africa—for centuries, but the global demand today puts many at risk of overharvesting.
When those ingredients are exported, however, international customers often have no idea where these products originated.
“Historically, the medicinal plant industry has had a lot of secrecy in it,” says Ann Armbrecht, director of the Sustainable Herbs Program, which supports transparency in herb sourcing. Companies don’t want to share proprietary information, and consumers don’t think to ask, says Armbrecht, who was not involved with the report. She says that when she got her start in this field, “there was so much discussion about where food came from, and nobody was asking where the chamomile in their [tea] came from.”
Sourcing frankincense responsibly is challenging because expansion of farmland and overharvesting reduces the already limited distribution of trees. Modern slavery, workers’ rights violations, and child labor are problems in Somalia and Yemen. In Somaliland, workers reliant on frankincense for their main income are undermined by price fluctuations, and women often are excluded from owning or managing land where the trees grow.
Shea trees, overexploited for timber and charcoal production, are slow to regenerate. Meanwhile, demand for butter made from the nuts of shea fruit keeps growing. The seasonal harvesting of shea nuts, done mainly by women, can be dangerous, as the trees may be infested with venomous snakes. In Mali, children have been used in harvesting, according to reports.
Risks to workers are high: Child labor and modern slavery have been documented in the supply chain, and employees sometimes work without contracts, resulting in low and unreliable pay. Harvesters who live in temporary forest camps face health and safety problems such as insect bites, parasites, unclean drinking water—even jaguar attacks. In 2020, the International Trade Union Confederation named Brazil as one of the world’s 10 worst countries in terms of violence against workers.
Threats to Juniperus communis, a shrub that’s slow to regenerate, include decreased grassland habitat, fungal disease, overgrazing by livestock, and overharvesting. In eastern and central Europe, berries often are gathered by disadvantaged groups such as the Roma, including their children.
Baobab trees are thinly distributed, and land clearing by rural communities threatens their populations. Women and children often collect baobab fruit, leaves, and bark—work that may require walking long distances and climbing the trees, with the risk of accidental falls.
The labor-intensive process of extracting oil from argan fruit usually falls to Indigenous women, who are often illiterate, paid below minimum wage, and excluded from decision-making. Demand for argan oil has been increasing, but drought and habitat loss and overharvesting of wood for fuel and fruit for oil production are obstacles for the slow-growing trees. Child labor, harsh working conditions, and intermittent pay are documented problems.
The candelilla shrub is at risk of overharvesting for the wax derived from its stems. CITES, which regulates the global wildlife trade, restricts cross-border commerce of the wax. Low wages are common for candelilleros who extract the wax. Health insurance is rare, and processing candelilla requires using sulfuric acid, harmful to the skin, eyes, teeth, and lungs.
Harvesters of pygeum bark, also called African cherry, are paid so little that to make a worthwhile profit, they often cut down the trees and take all their bark. “Bark poachers” sometimes bribe local communities for access to the diminishing numbers of trees.
To ensure regeneration of this fragrant, herbaceous plant, the government of Nepal recommends that one-third of the underground stems be left intact. But harvesters who take out loans from traders may strip whole stems to pay off their debts.
Climate change, livestock grazing, and overharvesting challenge the Senegalia senegal shrub, source of gum arabic. In the top exporting countries—Sudan, Chad, and Nigeria—workers from marginalized communities who do most of the harvesting make little money and are deprived of rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining.
Overharvesting threatens this slow-growing medicinal plant, affected by habitat destruction and stripping by herbivores such as deer.
Diana Marques, NGM Staff
Source: Schindler C. and others, Wild check – Assessing risks and opportunities of trade in wild plant ingredients, 2022
What should consumers do?
The first step is to “just notice that you’re buying something that has a wild ingredient in it,” Schindler says. She encourages consumers to tell their family and friends and post on social media when they use wild ingredients.
Various certification programs evaluate wild plant supply chains for sustainability and employment conditions. Among them are the Forest Stewardship Council, the Rainforest Alliance, Fair for Life, and the Union for Ethical Biotrade. FairWild, a foundation that assesses both social and biological risks to wild plants, recommends best practices for their sourcing.
Many companies advertise certifications, either on the product label or online. If those aren’t listed, Schindler encourages people to ask companies how they ensure that their products aren’t harming biodiversity and that harvesters are paid and treated fairly. “Until businesses get a bit more pressure from consumers, we won’t see any changes happening,” she says.
Companies that don’t make the effort to learn about the sources of their ingredients will start doing so if consumers demand it, Armbrecht says. “The more companies know that consumers are aware of the difference between wild and cultivated plants,” she says, the more they’ll think, Oh, we should know that too. What are we doing in these regions?”
Consumers shouldn’t stop using these products, Schindler says, “because actually, the ingredients are really critical to a lot of people’s livelihoods.”
(Sources: National Geographic)
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