TIRANA, May 25 – Agriculture officials and experts have called on farmers to engage in traditional medicinal plants instead of the illegal cannabis cultivation, whose rapid spread in the past couple of years had had a negative effect on the country’s key agriculture sector, shifting attention away from traditional crops.
Speaking this week at a conference on medicinal and aromatic plants this week, Agriculture Minister Edmond Panariti said the government strategy to develop remote areas is promoting the cultivation of medicinal plants.
“The variety of medicinal and aromatic plants cultivated and collected in Albania is more than 30 and they are all exported. We have a strategy to develop agriculture even in hilly and mountainous areas and it’s exactly the aromatic and medicinal plants that are offered as an alternative to replace the negative phenomenon of narcotic plants such as cannabis,” said Panariti.
The minister also reiterated his appeal to farmers to cultivate indigenous medicinal plants instead of imported seeds.
“What we must fanatically preserve is the indigenous varieties such as the sage and this is a priority for us,” said minister Panariti.
His comments came at a conference called ‘Medicinal and aromatic plants instead of narcotic ones,’ held this week in Korà§a, southeastern Albania, by the Essence Producers and Cultivators Association (EPCA).
Albanian police say they destroyed 2.5 million of cannabis plants in 2016 spread over a 213 hectare area nationwide, a 3-fold increase compared to the whole of 2015, making Albania Europe’s largest cannabis producer.
Hundreds of farmers turned to illegal and much more profitable cannabis cultivation in the past couple of years considering the fact that a kilo of cannabis sells at Euro 200 to 300 locally, a huge amount equal to cultivating about 1 metric ton of traditional crops such as wheat or corn.
Experts have warned the cannabis phenomenon shifts attention from the key agriculture sector, distorts the labor market and strengthens the criminal economy.
According EPCA association, Albania has the world’s highest per capita amount of medicinal and aromatic plants, but collects and processes one third of the plants grown in the territory. About 25,000 households nationwide still rely on medicinal plants for a living.
Albania’s exports of medicinal plants, the country’s second largest agricultural exports after canned fish, registered a slight decline in 2016, ending their six-year upward trend that more than doubled their exports in the past decade.
Exports of “oil seeds, industrial and medicinal plants and straw,” within which medicinal plants account for the overwhelming majority, slightly fell to 14,061 metric tons worth about 4 billion lek (€29 mln) in 2016, down from a record high of 14,453 tonnes worth about 4.1 billion lek (€30 mln) in 2015, dropping by an annual 3 percent, according to state statistical institute, INSTAT.
The decline comes amid rising cannabis cultivation and as farmers have shifted to cultivating some imported seeds, not much favoured by buyers in the U.S. and Germany, the top destinations for the country’s medicinal plants.
In communist times, Albania earned about $50 million a year exporting medicinal herbs, and the sector employed roughly 100,000 people. Experts say that if the plants were cultivated instead of being picked wild as they have been so far, the harvest could be increased as much as six fold.
While Albania is rich in medicinal plants, it massively imports all essential oils due to an almost inexistent processing industry during the past 25 years.
Agriculture is a key sector in the Albanian economy, employing about half of the country’s GDP but producing only about 20 percent of the GDP, unveiling its low productivity which is hampered by fragmentation of farm land into small plots and poor financing and technology employed.
