Economic analysis of conservation and sustainable use of indigenous medicinal plants by smallholder farmers.

Abstract

The agricultural sector is a lucrative pillar of survival for smallholder farmers worldwide for its determination to produce commodities that are key components in survival such as food. Farming is ideally one of the best means that has kept a significant number of smallholder farmers from poverty, malnourishment and food insecurity. African agriculture contributes merely 15% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with smallholder farmers producing approximately 80% of the food from farms that are less than 2 hectares each. Smallholder farmers are involved in numerous direct and indirect methods of sustaining livelihoods such as passive income received from remittances from family, income from formal employment, and income from social grants. Medicinal plants have existed indigenously within the environments where smallholder farmers live for time immemorial. They have been great contributors to the livelihoods of smallholder farmers starting from health benefits greatly in bringing monetary value to household income through the development of trade arrangements of medicinal plants. There is a big market for medicinal plant products from people seeking traditional healthcare for themselves, livestock health and potential trade of high-value medicinal plants with pharmaceutical mega companies. However, smallholder farmers are faced with various impediments in the production of medicinal plants. Limited resources that are necessary for housing and sanitation, basic education, basic healthcare and crime prevention prohibit sustainable progress in the husbandry of and maintainable use of medicinal plants. Furthermore, the overharvesting of lucrative medicinal plant species without the desired amounts of propagation is depleting valuable species from existence and poses a threat to ecology and species diversity. The study investigates the conservation and sustainable use of indigenous medicinal plants by smallholder farmers of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It seeks to identify and profile challenges faced by different indigenous smallholder farmers, establish the determinants of profitability for high-value medicinal plants, assess the effective production of household welfare, and examine conservation strategies of indigenous medicinal. A sample size of 150 smallholder farmers actively involved in medicinal plant extraction and trade was used to achieve the objectives of the study. Descriptive statistics and regression analyses were utilized to analyse the relationship between social demographics, economic factors, institutional, profitability and conservational factors of smallholder medicinal plant farmers. The Tobit regression model was used to identify and profile different challenges faced by different indigenous medicinal plant farmers. The results portrayed an adverse relationship between challenges in adopting medicinal plant farming, age, gender and education. The knowledge about indigenous medicinal plants is vested with the old generation of the community that has little or no education, who are mostly females, therefore they are most eligible to reap economic benefits. The profitability and determinants of high-value medicinal plant farmers were established using the budgetary technique and multiple regression. The statistical evidence suggests that variable costs impact significantly on the level of profitability of a farmer. In the case of the study, analyses revealed that the cost of production is relatively low due to the abundance of valuable medicinal species in the wild and most of the farmers, extract for themselves without needing to hire labour. Moreover, the factors influencing the production output were measured with a Multiple regression model. The variable costs influence the gross value of the production level at a 1% significance. The effects of producing medicinal plants were measured using the Propensity Score Matching technique. The econometric results showed that the production of medicinal plants has strong conservational outcomes, income generation opportunities, livelihood enhancement and poverty alleviation. The conservation strategies of indigenous medicinal plants were generated using a Likert scale and were analysed using descriptive statistics. The results depicted that there is a negative relationship between over-exploitation and the conservation of medicinal plants. Furthermore, evidence showed that more smallholder farmers are in the habit of harvesting medicinal plant material without proper intentions to propagate. Given that the medicinal plant market is promising to be booming, smallholder farmers should be encouraged to participate and share written knowledge with each other such that information is not lost. The increased profitability of the enterprise impacts positively on the livelihoods, social welfare of smallholder farmers and food security. However, if farmers are not courteous about maintaining the species diversity they may face an endangerment problem in future. This will need conservational experts and extension officers to be directly involved in imparting knowledge and foreseeing that order is maintained accordingly.