Everyday foods and cosmetics that use wild plants may be harming the environment Shea, argan, licorice, and more: Behind products like lotion, shampoos, and tea, complex supply chains hide environmental and social risks.

 Wild plants may be harming the environment. 

Everyday foods and cosmetics that use wild plants may be harming the environment. 

Shea, argan, licorice, and more: Behind products like lotion, shampoos, and tea, complex supply chains hide environmental and social risks.

Shea, argan, licorice, and more: Behind products like lotion, shampoos, and tea, complex supply chains hide environmental and social risks. 

 

Wild plants—such as Brazil nuts and licorice root (above) and frankincense, goldenseal, and gum arabic (below)—are used in food, cosmetics, and medicine. But little thought is given to where they’re found or how they’re harvested.

BYRACHEL FOBAR PUBLISHED AUGUST 29, 2022

The chocolate you eat, the moisturizer you use, the tea you drink—these everyday products contain ingredients from wild plants. The way those plants—many of them threatened—are harvested may be damaging the environment and exploiting workers, a recent report found.

The UN-affiliated report by wildlife trade experts highlights 12 plants: frankincense, shea, Brazil nut, juniper, licorice, baobab, argan, candelilla, pygeum, jatamansi, gum arabic, and goldenseal.

Plant derivatives in household products often have “flown under the radar,” says Caitlin Schindler, lead author of the report and a project manager at Traffic, a nonprofit that monitors the sustainability of the wildlife trade. They “sit there somewhere in the middle of the ingredients list” on product labels. Even if consumers notice ingredient names, there’s no information about what’s involved in obtaining or processing them.

For example, about 20,000 Brazilians’ income depends directly or indirectly on the harvesting of Brazil nuts, which are one of the most widely consumed tree nuts in the world and are vulnerable to extinction. Entire families often come from neighboring regions to harvest the nuts, living in temporary forest camps, which provide poor shelter and no access to clean water. Here, workers risk being stung by scorpions, struck by heavy falling fruit, and attacked by jaguars. After the nuts are sold, importing countries profit, marking up the price about 2.5 times, even though no further processing is required.

Many plants identified in the report—published in April by Traffic, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Medicinal Plant Specialist Group with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—are threatened with extinction. The main threats are overharvesting, invasive pests and disease, climate change, and habitat loss. As with Brazil nuts, harvesting plants for their ingredients may involve child labor and violations of workers’ rights, according to the report. Many of those who do the harvesting are poor, female, and live in marginalized rural areas.

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/everyday-foods-and-cosmetics-that-use-wild-plants-may-be-harming-the-environment