ProFound’s consultant Jolanda van Hal just returned from a mission to Nepal for the project “Succeeding with CITES: Sustainable and equitable Jatamansi trade from Nepal”. A good time to reflect on activities and developments in the past months. As a reminder: In this project funded by the Darwin Initiative, we are working with ANSAB, the Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources and TRAFFIC International. One of the project aims is to produce FairWild certified Jatamansi by the end of 2020.
Pre-audit assessment for the Jatamansi harvesting
In order to see how far the project still has to go to produce Fairwild certified Jatamansi, ANSAB organised a pre-audit assessment of the Jatamansi harvesting sites in Jumla and Mugu.
During the assessment, the auditor Mr. Wolfgang Kathe and ANSAB team visited the harvesting sites. they conducted meetings with Community Forest User Groups (CFUG) members, harvesters and processors. The auditor also reviewed the management plans and documentation process at CFUG, local enterprise and producer company levels and identified several gaps that need to be addressed. CFUGs and processors have until the FairWild audit in next harvesting season to close these gaps.
The overall reflection of the assessment is that:
- In terms of ecological criteria and indicators of the standard the CFUGs and producer company are well advanced.
- Project partners were well trained in the FairWild standard. They generally have a good idea about what will be required by FairWild.
- Trainings are mostly adequately documented at the field level.
Training for a Fairwild certified Jatamansi
In October 2019, ANSAB and TRAFFIC organized a FairWild auditor’s training for participants from organisations such as Ceres, FECOFUN and FAO Nepal. The goal was to teach participants the tools, knowledge and skills needed to verify sustainable wild collection practices against the FairWild Standard. Mr. Wolfgang Kathe facilitated the training. He is a FairWild-approved auditor and trainer.
ProFound’s workshop dedicated to the creation of a marketing strategy
In January, ANSAB and ProFound organised a workshop for the producer companies in the project of Fairwild certified Jatamansi. The workshop served two main goals:
- To update the companies on developments in the project thus far, including main lessons learned from the pre-audit.
- To share a method to build a marketing strategy to enter the European market and to show how FairWild certification can support their market access for Jatamansi.
Jolanda let individual meetings with the prioritized producer companies after the workshop. In these sessions, the companies’ individual marketing strategies were discussed, in order to support them to access European markets. Several of these companies will be presenting their products at BioFach in Nuremberg, 12-15 February 2020.