Argan Oil & Liquorice: Wild Harvest Improvement Project
Morocco & Uzbekistan
What do anchovies and argan oil have in common?
If you guessed that it’s their wildness that brings them together, you’d be right. Even in our technologically advanced time, humanity is still as dependent on wild animals and plants for survival as ever before. Commercial fishing, wild plant collecting, and logging are foraging on an industrial scale, providing us all with food, materials, and diverse specialty products that cultivation can’t or won’t.
Raw liquorice roots piled high. Argan fruit, from which the oil-bearing nut is extracted.
The challenge
Despite its importance, the exploitation of nature on a large scale can have large-scale consequences. Populations of valuable wild species can collapse if pushed too far. Certification is a solution, requiring that producers meet strict sustainability standards to participate. However, many producers are a long way off from meeting these standards, with a potentially costly journey ahead during which time they can expect little support and cannot advertise themselves as sustainable. This discourages producers from engaging with certification.
Goats browse in an argan tree.
The solution: building on solid foundations
The seafood sector came up with a forward-looking solution to this problem in recent decades: Fisheries Improvement Projects, or FIPs. This widely adopted strategy has the stakeholders in a fishery coming together to improve management of their resource, emphasizing continuous improvement over perfection and economic as well as ecological sustainability. Wild Harvest Improvement Projects – WHIPs – are our innovative attempt to bring this learning to the wild plants and fungi sector.
FIPs begin with an understanding that maximum sustainability impact is best achieved with large scale whole-fishery interventions. To get as many stakeholders on board as possible, the requirements needed to join have to be accessible and achievable, only increasing over time alongside regular, vigorous consultation. Wild plants would also benefit from landscape-level approaches, avoiding scenarios where some sub-populations are driven to extinction while others are kept in stasis in Protected Areas. A key question for the WHIPs project is how to achieve the large-scale collaboration seen in FIPs.
Our vision
To test this, we have chosen two model systems: liquorice harvesting in Uzbekistan and argan harvesting in Morocco. Both products are highly valuable and beginning to face overharvesting, with liquorice exported in vast quantities to East Asia and argan threatened by both overharvesting by people and overgrazing by goats. Both industries – especially argan – are heavily supported by the local authorities. We aim to learn how WHIPs could be implemented in the future in promising but challenging conditions like these, and what the barriers to their success may be.
WHIPs is a special project for FairWild. It targets more diverse harvesters – those further away from being truly sustainable – and a larger geographic scale than traditional certification. If successful, it could open up a new frontier of WHIP implementation. We’re excited about that.
We can’t transform wild value chains on our own. Here are our partners:
More from FairWild
You can learn more about the WHIPs target species here: