Under The Deep Shade of the forest canopy, Dave Hicks bent down to examine a plant that didn't even reach his knee. At first glance the plant was indistinguishable from any of a dozen others nearby, but Hicks thought this one had promise.
He fanned the plant's leaves to confirm his identification. Each of its compound leaves was made up of a whorl of five leaflets, with the middle three leaves larger than the other two. It was a mature plant, too, what Hicks calls a "three pronger." The three leaf stems (or "prongs") that branch from the center stem each ended in that whorl of five leaflets.
Three leaf stems usually indicate that the plant is more than six years old-old enough to produce viable seed in the bright red berries that appear in late summer. The plant was ginseng , for sure, and if it had been ginseng -collecting season, the plant would have been an excellent candidate for digging. But New York State's ginseng hunting season had not yet begun the day Hicks toured his woodland property in Granville, about 60 miles northeast of Albany.
Because he was after a rare plant with a commercial use whose harvest is regulated, he had to content himself with scouting for good-looking plants like the one that had caught his eye. He stroked the plant's smooth, green stem. "See how thick it is?" he asked. "A thick stem usually means a thick root." Ever so carefully he cleared the black soil away from the "neck" of the plant.
The neck looked like a knotted string, but it was actually a series of stem scars at the top of the plant's root. Hicks was surprised to see just four scars, meaning the plant was only about four years old, much younger than he expected.
Still, he cleared the soil away from a portion of the root about the size of a dime-as much as he would allow himself out of season. He shook his head. The root was puny. Because of its youth and its small size, that ginseng root would not bring a good price when the season opened, or for seeeverall years to come.
For millennia, ginseng grew in the wild and was collected by people, like Hicks, who were familiar with its terrain. Today, most ginseng is cultivated, grown on farms, in rows, under shade cloths, sprayed with insecticide and nurtured with fertilizer. Each year the wild ginseng collected from the forest's deep shade is, on average, much like Hicks' promising plant: younger and smaller than anyone wishes.
In the beverage aisle of your local supermarket, iced teas containing ginseng extract, some promising energy, sit on the shelf next to plain teas promising nothing more than a refreshing drink. A few aisles away, herbal capsules containing ginseng have been placed on the shelf next vitamins.
In the past few years, ginseng products have become much more visible to the average American consumer. But the vast bulk of the ginseng produced or collected in the United States-some 2.7 million pounds of it in 1997 alone by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's tally-never winds up on the shelves of American supermarkets, health food stores or even in the hands of American practitioners of herbal medicine.
About 90 percent of the most valuable type of ginseng -wild plants more than six years old whose roots earn collectors $250 a pound-is exported from the United States. Most of these exports, about 80 percent of the total, go to Hong Kong. Most of the rest goes to other East Asian nations, particularly Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia.
The trade of wild ginseng from North America to Asia has been going on for 300 years and once played a vital role in the economic health of the newly independent United States. Today the ginseng trade is regulated by an international treaty, which compels the need for federal and state regulations as well.
Last weekend, the ginseng collectors of New York State began heading out to scour the forests, primarily in the Catskills and in the Finger Lakes region. Some will sell the plants they collect to Hiiccks, who i
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ternational community recognized that American ginseng was a plant at risk. When the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species treaty was drawn up, American ginseng was listed in Appendix II, which puts it in the same category as fur seals, the West African manatee and most of the world's monkeys.
By signing the treaty, the United States agreed to create regulations that would make sure that the collection and sale of American ginseng would not be detrimental to the species' population in the wild. These federal regulations say, among other things, that states that wish to export the ginseng cultivated or collected wild within its borders must set up regulations for those activities (including setting a season for the collection of wild ginseng ). The states must also file an annual report on the amount of ginseng sold by county and have on file information about the wild ginseng population.
Twenty-three states have ginseng regulations in place, although some of these, such as those in Maine and New Hampshire, have programs for cultivated ginseng only. The May, 1998, report on American ginseng by Traffic revealed that few states comply with every detail of the federal law and that there are significant discrepancies between the amount of wild ginseng exported as reported to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by the states and the larger amount of wild ginseng reported to U.S. Customs by the exporters themselves.
While an unknown amount of ginseng is being collected and sold outside of the legal programs, law-abiding members of the ginseng trade firmly believe in the importance of protecting this natural resource. Hicks, for one, says the regulations on ginseng are keeping him in business.
"The regulations are a good thing," he says. "Without them the resource would be gone-or be declared an endangered species. Then no one could touch it."
- BY: Madeline Bodin. Madeline Bodin is a freelance writer.
- SOURCCE: Newsday
1999.09.07
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