The Herb Trade

INTRODUCTION

Herbal Medicine, like everything else, needs to have a policy towards climate change and, more pressingly, the effects of passing peak oil production and the consequent influences of energy descent. We are also starting to see evidence of an equal anxiety, that of unsustainable bureaucracy. Herbal medicine in its own small way can observe at first hand the effects of incomprehensible, ambiguous and conflicting regulations. Heedlessly unjust, antisocial, counter-environmental and petty, they are surely accelerating towards collapse. In the interim, this obsession with regulation of both herbal practitioners and suppliers edges us closer to the orthodox models of globalisation of supply and demand and a high-technology, high-energy approach to the way we go about our business – entirely in the opposite direction to what, in our deeply considered opinion, will be needed (whether we like it or not). We can either start rehearsing our own necessary adaptations in an imaginative and well co-ordinated fashion or we can complacently wait for the worst to befall us from dramatic & sudden changes in socio-economic forces. Suppliers, like practitioners, all have different starting points – but we think it’s clear that there is a line we all have to travel down together.

We believe that herbalists and their suppliers should be at the cutting edge of environmental initiatives. This, regrettably, is not the case. Even now the majority of the medicines available to practitioners from commercial suppliers are not grown organically. Too little attention is paid to sustainability issues, fair working conditions for third world growers and producers, carbon footprinting of herbal supplies, and so on. The situation is even worse where the over-the-counter trade (that supplies the public) is concerned.

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