Times are good for the botanical industry, what with all the sandalwood soap, cherry-bark conditioner, and ginseng gum on store aisles these days.

But all that essential oil and tree bark has got to come from some place, and those places are disappearing as the demand grows.

So in an herbal love triangle, industry, government and academia have come together to teach those at the bottom of the herbal chain - the pickers and growers - how to keep their products alive.

Aveda, an Estee Lauder business unit whose hair and cosmetic products are created from flower and plant ingredients, has hired American Indian communities to plant sage and cedar where none existed. A Rutgers University professor is teaching Madagascar farmers about overharvesting. And the U.S. Forestry Service has implanted thousands of tracking chips into ginseng plants to prevent poaching.

"These plants have been used for thousands of years. What's made it different is globalization," said James Simon, the Rutgers plant science professor, who spoke at a recent medicinal- and aromatic-plant conference in Philadelphia. "There's a $17 billion trade in natural products; it's a consumer-driven phenomenon."

Even children are learning the values and needs of medicinal plants. The Kimberton Waldorf school in Chester County, Pa., is working with American Indian herbal specialist Tis Mal Crow, of Cherokee and Hitchiti descent, to plant a two-acre medicinal and aromatic garden.

"The goal of the garden is first to acknowledge that these plants are valuable and potentially endangered, and by protecting them, they have something to teach us," said Mason Vollmer, the gardening teacher at the school, which received a $20,000 federal grant for the project. "But gave me a list of 300-some plants. Some he can send me, but others I have to find, and I'm a little overwhelmed."

The overharvesting problem started in the late 1980s when organic and herbal products began to boom, said Wayne Owen, national botany program leader for the U.S. Forest Service. Saint John's Wort was in demand for depression, then ginseng for energy and echinacea for colds.

As demand went up, so did the price for the raw goods. At the extreme end, wild ginseng roots, often found in the forests of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, fetched $400 a pound at market as recently as 1998. Poachers began stealing roots, and many gardeners who had plots started digging up roots without replanting seeds.

Over the last decade, many of the wild roots have disappeared - leaving only cultivated roots, which sell at a much lower price.

"I spend a lot of time worrying about ginseng conservation. There's so much less and less than there was," Owen said. "In the parks in Tennessee and North Carolina, the foresters have gone so far as to electronically tag individual plants in the forest" to catch poachers.

The problem is exacerbated on a global scale because many of the raw materials are picked by poor people. When company X needs plant Y for their product, harvesters may strip plants bare to bring in the most money.

Organic industries create additional demand because their products need to be certified. Some crops, such as coffee beans, also receive a "Fair Trade" certificate. Some communities cannot handle these additional demands, and must sell to middlemen, who handle the certification process, for a lesser price, environmental officials said.

"In the forest service, the marketing and harvesting of trees is very strict. There's a very small chain from the people who chop the tree to the company," Owen, the U.S. Forest Service botany program leader, said. "In this industry, there's a much longer chain, and everyone wants their cut."

Aveda president Dominque Conseil said there were only a few products for which his company can oversee the process, literally, down to the roots.

"With the geranium oil that we use in our color conserve, we get that from South Africa. And there is a batch number on the bottle so we can go back and find out which farm and which field, and even which harvesting team," he said.

Such a direct connection is rarely available, he said, repeating a commonly voiced frustration that middlemen often block company officials from working directly with the growers and harvesters.

That's why, when the company wanted to start an "indigenous line" based on American Indian herbs, it hired American Indian communities in New Mexico and Montana and Canada to plant the cedar, sage and sweet grass used in the products.

"It's not just about the biodiversity of the plants, but about the social and cultural issues as well," Conseil said.

Ultimately, sustainability is up to the consumer, Conseil said. There's only so much a company or a governmental agency can do if the consumers don't demand and pay for the extra steps sustainability demands.

"Big companies can go to smaller communities, poor communities, and say `we'll buy your product, but only if you do it organically, environmentally,' " Simon, the Rutgers professor, said. "But the challenge is that it's really difficult to organize those practices and to monitor them. And sometimes, the right way to do things isn't clear."

From Healthy.net