Wild at Home Using Markets for Wild Ingredients to Support Conservation and Rural Livelihoods

Exploring issues and opportunities of the wild harvest

Many wild plants are harvested and traded with little consideration for sustainability or whether local harvesters are fairly paid. 

This is to a large extent due to a lack of visibility and accountability: the ingredients are difficult to trace back to source along complex supply chains, current sources of information are not easy to find or digest, and those sources available don’t provide clear insights into conservation and social risks and opportunities. At the same time, businesses feel little pressure from buyers or customers about the sustainability of wild-sourced ingredients, as public understanding of what ‘wild’ ingredients are and what risks are associated with them is very low. 

To address a lack of voluntary systems available to support and verify wild harvest management systems as meeting sustainability and ethical trade criteria, TRAFFIC, the FairWild Foundation, and partners developed the FairWild Standard, which is now recognised as best practice for wild plant sourcing (for example, by the Convention on Biological Diversity).

Although growing year-on-year, trade in FairWild ingredients represents a tiny fraction of the world’s trade. Many businesses using wild-sourced ingredients are not ready to make the leap towards third-party verified systems. How do we motivate and support those businesses to start their wild plant responsible sourcing journey?