Conservation of Indigenous Medicinal Plants in Canada

Herbal medicine use is widely popular in Canada, in part because of growing interest in health promotion and folk healing in the general population, disenchantment with some biomedical therapies, and public awareness of herbal remedies due to advertising and media reports. Many therapeutic herbs are gathered from their natural habitats; few are widely cultivated. In addition, some consumers express a preference for ‘wildcrafted’ herbs, believing them to be more effective and less likely to be contaminated with agricultural chemicals than cultivated herbs. As a result, some wild populations of indigenous medicinal plants are at risk from overharvesting, just as wild echinacea, goldenseal, and American ginseng have been overexploited in the United States. In Canada, there is no formal system of accounting for medicinal plant harvesting, so little is known about which plants are being harvested, from where, and in what quantity. Few safeguards exist; individual species may be protected under the Species at Risk Act and under provincial Wildlife Acts, but such protection does not occur until plant populations are identified as being dangerously low. We propose a national system of regulation that includes (1) an enforceable legislative policy that protects wild plants from nonsustainable harvesting, both on public and private lands, (2) a monitoring and tracking system for all commercial harvesting of wild plants, and (3) a policy that encourages the propagation and cultivation of economically important medicinal plant species in order to reduce the harvesting pressure on wild populations.