Is there significant illegal trade in medicinal plants?
Given that there is so little regulation or monitoring of legal trade in countless medicinal plants, illegal trade is not generally a significant problem. In the cases where medicinal plant species are protected from trade, smuggling occurs if the plants are rare and valuable enough to risk the consequences. For example, wild Asian ginseng, which grows only in two provinces of far-eastern Russia and one province of China, is protected from trade in these two countries. But the finest specimens of wild Asian ginseng sell for tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. These high prices create a tremendous incentive for poachers, and as many as 600 kilograms of wild ginseng are smuggled out of Russia every year. In the United States, trade in wild American ginseng has been regulated for decades, but poaching inside national parks still occurs.
