BIOCULTURAL PROTOCOL
2010
Access to natural resources: For our medicines, we require access to medicinal plants, yet there are
a number of inter-related factors that are hindering our ability to harvest the
medicinal plants we require. There are three main types of land in the K2C – communal, protected
and private - each one with its particular problems.
Access to communal lands is regulated by traditional leaders who either require unrealistic sums of
money for access or we endure conflict. The numbers of plants are falling due to over-harvesting by
herbalists or muti hunters who collect large quantities using unsustainable methods. The
Mariepskop (protected) conservation area is important to us because of the great diversity of plants
it sustains, but difficult for us to access because we have until very recently been unsure of the
regulations relating to collecting medicinal plants, and face logistical and cost related barriers to
traveling to those areas.
The amount you have to pay is also related to the amount you harvest, and the combined price of
transport and the collected plants is beyond our means. We have also been asked for bribes from
the conservation guards. Similarly, we are excluded from the Bushbuck Ridge Nature Reserve, which
is closer to us than Mariepskop but remains totally inaccessible.
Private land is off-bounds to us and it is hard for us to even conceive of gaining access to those
areas.
No benefit sharing: We have been visited by scores of researchers who generally provide us with
few details of who they are working for and what our knowledge will be used for. We have not yet
entered into any benefit sharing agreements regarding our knowledge or material transfer
agreements for the plants they have accessed. This experience has made us jaded about sharing
information with researchers, who we now distrust. We want our consent to be sought before our
knowledge or plants are taken and to be acknowledged as the holders of the knowledge and benefit
from any commercialization.
We also face payment issues within the community. We always treat patients and only ask for
money afterwards. Because of the general poverty in the area, this means we are often not paid for
the services we provide our community.
Discrimination: We face discrimination from the police who arrest us if a patient dies whilst in our
care (unlike western doctors) and are often targeted if people die in inexplicable circumstances. Our
relationship with Christian institutions is also strained as they claim our practices are not consistent
with the Christian faith. This is not true, as we are all churchgoing Christians. Finally, often medical
clinics warn patients against engaging with us, when in fact our medicines are complementary to
western drugs.
Improving Conservation and Sustainable Use of Medicinal Plants
To ensure that we can continue to provide for our communities, we require
continued access to medicinal plants, which means that over-harvesting in the
communal areas must be tackled and access to conservation areas improved.
We want to work with traditional authorities to better regulate the access to
communal lands by muti hunters. Their over-harvesting has to be better regulated
or else there will be no medicinal plants for us to harvest from the communal
areas. We want to explore how we can contribute to minimizing the
environmental degradation being carried out by the herbalists, by either through
TRADITIONAL HEALTH PRACTITIONERS OF BUSHBUCKRDIGE
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