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Together, they account for about 70 percent of the total harvest. Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia are the top five producers of wild-harvested American ginseng. “Ginseng and other non-timber forest products may provide an economic safety net in Appalachia and other rural areas of the eastern U.S.,” says Chamberlain, who also contributed to the economic study, along with SRS project leader Jeffrey Prestemon. That study was led by John Paul Schmidt, a researcher at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia and published in the journal Biological Conservation. Counties with more roads and more ginseng habitat also had higher harvest rates, as James Chamberlain, SRS research forest products technologist, showed in a separate paper on ginseng harvests. Price data came from other published sources.īetween 20, harvesters made an estimated $22 to $43 million each year from the sale of wild-harvested ginseng root.Ĭounties with more poverty and unemployment had much higher harvest rates. Fish and Wildlife Service for 1978 to 2013. The analysis was quite complicated, partly because the scientists controlled for changes in demand. The research is the first to show that a non-timber forest product can have a backward-bending supply curve. Photo by Gary Kauffman, USFS.įrey led a recent study published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics. A team of USDA Forest Service researchers has shown that the species has a backward-bending supply curve. “It’s not a very common outcome in economic studies.” Wild American ginseng harvests keep falling, even as prices rise.
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“It’s a very narrow set of conditions that allow a resource to operate with a backward-bending supply curve,” says Frey. (Most commercial marine fish species reach reproductive maturity in less than two years and can produce large quantities of eggs each year). Plants must be at least five years old before they begin to reproduce. Ginseng plants face biological limits on reproduction.“If I take a hike, you can still hike, too.” “It’s not like hiking, for example,” says Frey. The harvest is rivalrous – once a wild ginseng plant is harvested, it is gone.Functionally, ginseng is an open-access resource, even though it is not open-access in the legal sense. Ginseng has several things in common with marine fisheries: But wild ginseng has appeared to violate that law in recent years.īackward-bending supply curves were identified in the 1950s, in the context of marine fisheries. This relationship is so common that economists call it the Law of Supply. Typically, as the price of a product increases, producers supply a larger quantity for sale. Supply curves show how price and quantity are related. “It indicates a backward-bending supply curve.” “It’s pretty unusual that the more effort put towards producing something, the less is produced,” says USDA Forest Service researcher Greg Frey. But the average harvest amount has dwindled, while price has skyrocketed. Tens of thousands of pounds are harvested from the wild each year. Illustration by Jacob Bigelow, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.Īmerican ginseng ( Panax quinquefolius) is a plant of great value. It is also used in Chinese medicine and has been exported since the mid-1700s. Indigenous people used wild American ginseng for many purposes.