Who Takes All That Chiraita ?

So little information is available about the international trade in Himalayan herbs once they leave Indian shores, that any study, however inadequate, is still better than nothing at all. Some information can be gleaned from a 1982 study prepared by The International Trade Centre (UNCTAD/GATT) and entitled Markets for Selected Medicinal Plants and Their Derivatives.

The report estimates that the total import in 1980 of ^–vegetable materials used in pharmacy" by the European Economic Community was 80,738 tons. Topping the list of exporters was India, with 10,055 tons of plants and 14 tons of vegetable alkaloids and their derivatives. India's export of "crude plant materials^– to West Germany alone was 6929 ions. Plant and plant parts imported from India by Switzerland for perfumery and pharmacy was 465 tons in 1981. (A significant proportion of exports-which are said to be from India have their origins in the Himalayan region, including Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet).

The report cautions the reader that "European trade may be very unrepresentative of the trade in other areas," Take for example the plant known in Nepal as chiraita (Swertia chirata), which is indigenous to the Himalaya. It is estimated that some 150 tons of chiraita passes through Calcutta every year, but less than one ton was imported by West Germany and the United Kingdom, two major importing countries. So where does the rest of the chiraita end up? No one knows.

The study refers to the extreme difficulty of collecting any kind of data on the herbal trade and warns researchers not to be misled by what trade statistics exist. "While hundreds of medicinal plants are items of commerce, details of the volumes traded in most of these will only be obtained from individual traders and users; details of trade in the majority of individual medicinal plants do not appear in any published statistics. The same applies to many plants traded in developing countries and any local production or export figures that do exist rarely give a full picture."

A draft report, Importation of Medicinal Plants And Plant Extracts Into Europe: Conservation And Recommendation For Action prepared by Anna Lewington for Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF/International) in May 1992, found that in the absence of detailed official statistics, interviews with traders was the best avenue to pursue".

Lewington writes that "…the, complexity of trading network and levels of secrecy (or confidentiality) were such that very little can be ascertained…". The study found "a general reticence and nervousness amongst those dealing in any way with medicinal plants (either using, baying or brokering) to reveal the names, numbers and quantities of those involved, and most significantly the precise source of these plants." Lewington, too, found that trade catalogues were of little use.

Lewington ends her study with the following: "The strength of Western economies has largely depended on the successive plundering of natural resources, often plants from other people's lands…