Newsletter Number
17
May/June 2004
People and Plants International
Over a year's worth of meetings and workshops have now taken place to discuss what will happen to the People and Plants Initiative when it comes to an end in December 2004.
The outcome of this has been the formation of a new, independent non-profit organisation called People and Plants International (PPI) which will continue the work of the WWF, UNESCO and Kew partnership.
The creation of PPI followed a process of careful consultation with colleagues in a series of workshops in Oxford UK, Bogor Indonesia, Kunming China, and in East Africa (Kenya and Uganda).
Building a network for sustainable plant management and conservation
People and Plants International (PPI), which builds on the 12-year People and Plants Initiative, a partnership of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, UNESCO, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, was formed in January 2004.
PPI is a network of experienced professionals who practice applied ethnoscience. As a collaborative "knowledge network", PPI represents a new way of organizing international collaboration for research, conservation, and management of plant resources.
In particular, PPI:
Evaluates conservation and resource development strategies, identifying those likely to be more effective
Mentors young professionals from developing countries in action-orientated research through individual tuition & field courses
Disseminates recommendations to communities, managers of resources, policy-makers and scientists
Initial project areas will include Africa (Southern and East), Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea.
PPI is led by Dr. Tony Cunningham, Program Director.
PPI's website, peopleandplants.org, will be up and running by late 2004.
For further information contact the PPI Coordinator, Louis Putzel.
Publications
New People and Plants Books
The next books in the People and Plants Conservation Series are:
Forests, Livelihoods and the International Woodcarving Trade: carving out a future
Edited by: Anthony B. Cunningham, Bruce M. Campbell and Brian Belcher
Plant Identification, Conservation and Management: methods for producing user-friendly field guides
Edited by: Anna Lawrence & William Hawthorne
Future titles planned include an introductory textbook on plant conservation, and a book about medicinal plants and conservation.
Chinese Editions
The Chinese translation of Applied Ethnobotany is now available, with a special additional chapter about the application of ethnobotany in China.
People, Plants and Protected Areas has also been translated into Chinese, again with extra local information, and will be published later this year.
We are most grateful to Prof Pei Shengji (Kunming) for arranging and overseeing these translations.
Medicinal Plants
Medicinal Plants in Nepal -- update
The Dolpo region in north-west Nepal is one of the last and most intact sanctuaries of medicinal plants in western Nepal, and also one of the remotest. The Amchis (traditional healers) use over 400 types of medicinal plant to treat a variety of illnesses, and have extensive knowledge about the ecology and use of these different species.
As mentioned in the last Newsletter, the Himalayan Amchi Association (Nepal Branch) held their third workshop in January, and this included Amchis from India, China and Mongolia, as well as Nepal - the first time that Amchis have ever met internationally.
The People and Plants project in Nepal has been extremely successful in safeguarding indigenous knowledge through applying its use to the local health care system, and has developed a community-based model for medicinal plant conservation that could be extended to other Himalayan regions. During the remainder of 2004, the People and Plants Initiative has a number of important activities to accomplish, such as developing guidelines for medicinal plant cultivation, strengthening the Medicinal Plant Monitoring Committees, and supporting the Himalayan Amchi Association in lobbying for formal recognition of the Amchi health care system by the Nepalese Ministry of Health.
Medicinal Plant Conservation Guidelines
The World Health Organization, WWF, IUCN and TRAFFIC are currently engaged in a consultation to review the guidelines on conservation of medicinal plants, originally published by WHO, IUCN and WWF in 1993, but largely prepared at a meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand in 1988.
A first stage has been completed, which has involved the electronic consultation of about 300 people, and a full text draft version of the revised guidelines has now been sent out for a second round of consultation. An international consultative meeting will be held near Kunming, Yunnan, China on 28-30 June 2004 to develop these guidelines further.
A revision of the guidelines is thought to be useful at this time because of various developments in conservation and health care approaches. Two of these developments are the passage of the Convention on Biodiversity (1992) and its Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (2002). The original guidelines are mainly about activities co-ordinated at national level, but there is additional emphasis in the revised guidelines on the roles that industry and NGOs can play. WHO is engaged in a Traditional Medicine Strategy (2002-2005), one of its four objectives being the rational use of, and increasing access to, herbal medicines.
Medicinal Plants in Europe
A new Darwin-funded project on conservation of medicinal plants in Europe will study the case of Arnica in Romania. A 3-year grant has just been awarded by the Darwin Initiative to WWF-UK for this project (2004-2007). This will be run by the WWF Danube-Carpathian Programme Office, based in Bucharest, Romania, and the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in conjunction with WWF-UK.
The aim is to develop a model of sustainable production and trade in the species, the principles of which can be used to inform the development of general conservation methodologies for other medicinal plants. The project site is the community of Garda de Sus, Apuseni, an area of largely traditional agriculture.
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The newsletter, reflecting the activities of People and Plants, is compiled
by Martin Walters
People & Plants Editor and Web-manager
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