Patrick Van Damme
Ghent University, Belgium
Title: Defining (global) medicinal plant markets, a SWOT analysis
Biography
Biography: Patrick Van Damme
Abstract
Worldwide people have been, are still and will continue to use medicinal plants to cure all types of human (and animal) diseases. Numerous plants have compounds of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. Following ethnobotanical information (and/but also based on canvas sampling of plants), formal research has been able to confirm the activity spectrum of numerous plant-derived medicinal compounds, that were subsequently developed into herbal remedies and/or allopathic medicine. However, overexploitation/overharvesting from the wild, driven by 'promising' markets and prospects of (quick/easy) benefits may alter and even annihilate the often precarious natural resource basis. Through a number of telling examples from the field (with an emphasis on perennials from the tropics) and based on our own research findings, we will try to address/define strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) to developing herbal and plant-based medicinal markets