Mountain people call it "sang." Once an easy source of extra income, wild ginseng is being depleted so rapidly exports of immature wild ginseng roots are banned, and its harvest is illegal in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Macon County resident Jimmy Hall said he quit hunting ginseng because the pickings grew so lean. Officials said people are ripping plants from the ground before they can produce seeds.
"People are digging it way before the season starts," Hall said. "They're just stripping it out."
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week banned exports of immature wild ginseng roots - plants less than 5 years old - in an attempt to curb the practice. The ban doesn't apply to cultivated roots.
However, wild ginseng is prized far more highly in Asian markets, selling for $250 to $300 per pound, compared with $15 to $20 per pound for cultivated roots. The wild variety grows in deciduous forests in the North, Southeast and Midwest.
Ginseng roots have been exported to Asia since the early 18th century, but the market has exploded in recent years because ginseng root is regarded as a cure-all in Asia. It also is popular worldwide in herbal medicines, foods and tonics.
During the past 30 years, cultivating ginseng has become a multimillion-dollar business.
North Carolina ranks seventh among states in the export of wild ginseng, averaging nearly 9,000 pounds a year. Jackson County was the top wild ginseng county in 1998, with 872 pounds of the root collected, followed by Madison County with 717 pounds.
But in North Carolina over the last three years, the ginseng harvest has declined nearly 50 percent, officials said, but demand remains high and many people still profit from it. "It's hard to find," said Milas Rathbone, 85, of Haywood County, whose father taught him how to identify "sang" decades ago. "Everybody got to hunting it just for a hobby."
Nancy Gray, spokeswoman for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, said park bbbiollogists are finding only scattered plots of young ginseng and few mature plants. It is illegal to harvest the plant in the park, but people do anyway. "As the population has become depleted outside the park, poaching activities have increased," she said.
North Carolina's plant conservation program classifies ginseng as a protected plant, and state rules govern its sale, the registration of ginseng dealers and the times it can be collected - wild ginseng, from Sept. 1 through March 31. A special permit is needed for harvesting in national forests and written permission from a landowner before harvesting on private property.
Up to 600 permits were issued last year for the Nantahala National Forest and Pisgah National Forest, said Gary Kauffman, a U.S. Forest Service biologist. Ginseng-hunters can estimate a plant's age by the number of "prongs" or leafstalks, since the plant produces more prongs as it ages. A plant with three or more prongs is likely to be at least 5 years old.
A 5-year-old plant has had time to add its seeds and help sustain the population, said state ginseng coordinator Marj Boyer.
- SOURCE : The Associated Press ; Greensboro News Record
1999.08.21
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