Already, the Wildlands Conservation Trust has developed a licensing system that will permit the harvesting of plant and animal parts used in traditional healing from a 4 000ha conservancy in Maputaland, northern KZN, an area which Dr Kloppers said is being destroyed at a very rapid rate due to unsustainable harvesting of plants and animals for medicinal purposes. The success of their project is imperative as Dr Kloppers believes this unsustainable harvesting is leading to the extinction of rare and endemic species.
“A supervised and scientific system of sustainable resource harvesting will be developed that will use the community conservation area as a ‘wild’ nursery for indigenous medicine,” he explained. “These medicines will be supplied to an urban market thus doing away with the need for unsustainable and illegal harvesting. At the same time, the market price will drop due to the increased supply, making it more affordable to buyers.”
As he is a sangoma himself, Martin said he was very aware that the suppliers of traditional medicine were going about things in an unsustainable manner and were increasingly coming into conflict with landowners and the law because of it. “Buster is a hunter and had concerns about the number of animal parts that were being buried after hunts and culls. We started to think about ways in which we could sate the market with legal muti from various sources, to deter poaching. “It’s been a little controversial but you can’t ignore the fact that 80% of South Africans use traditional medicine at least once in their lives.
“Reserves and conservancies have to either cull or hunt 30% of their game annually – this is basically a huge resource, because if you’re a hunter and you shoot a leopard, you take the skin, but traditional healers are after everything else, from the fat to the gall bladder.”
Matheson and Martin originally had an arrangement with the KZN Hunters Association to buy animal body parts with medicinal properties. Martin and Dr Kloppers then worked out an arrangement to see the communities involved with the Maputaland conservancy profiting off fauna and flora in a similar fashion. The idea was also pitched to South African National Parks, who were sceptical at first, but eventually started to come on board, said Matheson.
