The Impacts of Forest Degradation on Medicinal Plant Use

P remedies are regularly hailed by the popular media and the conservation community to support the notion that the tropics’ diverse floral resources are an invaluable and largely untapped source of new pharmaceutical products. Such discussions frequently emphasize the importance of medicinal plants in the Brazilian Amazon— the largest contiguous reservoir of forest on Earth. Notably, although these discussions highlight the global consequences of biodiversity loss for pharmaceutical development, they rarely mention the local consequences of biological impoverishment for the health care of millions of Amazonians who depend on plant-based medicinals. More than 80% of the developing world continues to rely on traditional medicines, predominantly plants, for primary health care (Farnsworth et al. 1985). In Amazonia, medicinal plants serve as the main form of health care for a majority of the populace, in part because of cultural preference and also because of the prohibitive cost of pharmaceutical products. For large numbers of rural and urban poor people in this region, medicinal plants offer the only available treatments for both minor and serious ailments (Elisabetsky and Wannamacher 1993). Although tropical medicinal plants are lauded by the international media and used by millions of Brazilians, field research on the ecology of medicinal plants in the Brazilian Amazon has been surprisingly limited. The ethnobotanical literature on the Amazon includes a number of excellent botanical and biochemical studies of medicinal plants (Albuquerque 1989, Schultes and Raffauf 1990, van den Berg 1993, Duke and Vásquez 1994). However, with few exceptions (Phillips 1990, Martini et al. 1994), very little has been published on either the ecology of Amazonian medicinals or the implications of deforestation for individual medicinal species. The current unprecedented governmental and civic concern for sustainable land use in the Brazilian Amazon (Veríssimo et al. 2002a, 2002b) offers a timely opportunity to evaluate the links between forest conservation and national health care (Balick et al. 1995, Vieira 2002). In eastern Amazonia in particular, the rapid expansion of logging, ranching, mining, and agricultural conversion has brought about significant changes in forest composition and structure (Hecht 1985, Uhl et al. 1991, Veríssimo et al. 1992, Cochrane et al. 1999, Gerwing 2002).Among other things, new land-use regimes place increasing pressure on many native medicinal plant species (Caniago and Siebert 1998, Cunningham 2000). To comprehend how these changes affect the availability of plant medicines and the future of