The sociocultural formation of prices in Mongolian medicinal plant supply chains

This action, PLANTECON, based at SINOFON, a research centre unit hosted by the Department of Asian Studies, Palacky University, aims to investigate the sociocultural formation of price along Mongolian medicinal plant (MP) supply chains.

Within recent history, and intensively since the spread of Sars-Cov-2, MP supply chains--trade networks that move a product from its site of origin to a consumer market--have proliferated across Central Asia.

In Mongolia, otherwise-unemployed poor rural populations gather wild-growing plants and sell them at negotiated prices--the agreed-upon economic value that solidifies the exchange of the plant from one actor to another--into trade networks that move the plant to consumers in urban Mongolia or China.

The action has the following objectives: 1) identify the breadth and extent of the proliferating MP trade in two plants, Fang Feng and Liquorice Root, in Mongolia; 2) identify the diverse sociocultural factors that impact price negotiations in situ, following the process of price formation across a chain to identify how sociocultural considerations affect prices in the aggregate; and 3) establish the equitability potential of MP supply chains as rural development strategy.

Academically, this action will advance economic anthropology on pricing; and environmental, medical anthropology on the globalised traditional medicinal plant trade with potential for future cross-geographic ERC or Twinning grant proposals.

Economically and culturally, the action will draw attention to the booming, unregulated medicinal plant trade in Central Asia to increase cultural heritage and plant conservation action, but also inspire international funding bodies to either design value chain development projects that are equitable to rural populations or consider the implementation of plant benefit-sharing programmes.