Vietnam and China, the two largest markets for traditional medicine (TM) that uses wild plants and animals, announced a new partnership in January to adopt practices that protect wildlife while preserving the countries’ cultural heritage.
The first-of-its-kind agreement involved leading TM associations from Vietnam and China — the Vietnam Oriental Traditional Medicine Association (VOTMA) and the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine (CATCM) — along with researchers, policymakers and pharmaceutical leaders. TRAFFIC, an international NGO monitoring illegal wildlife trade, facilitated it.
The partnership aims to explore “several sustainable practices to make traditional medicine more conservation-friendly,” said TRAFFIC Vietnam director Trinh Nguyen in a statement to Mongabay. She said these include encouraging practitioners to switch to legal, sustainable and cultivated plant-based alternatives, and eliminating illegal wildlife ingredients in prescriptions.
Historical TM practices in the two countries have incorporated wildlife-derived ingredients, including those from threatened species, such as tiger bones, pangolin scales, rhino horns and bear bile. While many such ingredients are legal to trade inside China, the wildlife parts are often sourced from other countries to meet domestic demand. Many of the threatened species are, however, listed on CITES Appendix I, making the international trade in their parts illegal. As TM becomes popular globally, conservationists worry about its impact on wildlife.
“Traditional Chinese medicine has a sustainability problem,” said Jessica Bell Rizzolo, co-author of a 2023 WWF report on substitutes for wildlife parts in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). While TCM includes other practices that don’t use animal products, “there’s still a lot of animals included in the pharmacopeia,” she said.
With the partnership, both countries have agreed to develop best practices to ensure medicinal ingredients come from safe, legal and sustainable sources. They also plan on sharing knowledge on cultivation programs for medicinal plants, promoting research on safety and efficacy of wildlife part substitutes, and raising awareness among TM consumers and practitioners about how their choices impact conservation.
“This partnership marks a new chapter in traditional medicine — one that honours our ancestral wisdom while actively protecting the natural world that sustains it,” Dr. Do The Loc, vice president of VOTMA, said in a statement. “Our collaboration with the CATCM will help establish new standards for the entire region.”
The partnership also provides a framework for other countries with TM practices to follow, said Nguyen. The World Health Organization in 2019 backed TCM by including it in its International Classification of Diseases, a document that guides how doctors diagnose conditions. While this worried conservation groups, China is pushing TCM globally.
“It’s a good time to be thinking about sustainability,” Rizzolo said, commending the partnership for involving TM practitioners to find substitutes that work within their systems of medicine and their culture.
“The fact that it’s emerging from those countries, I think, is really excellent,” she said, adding she’s “cautiously optimistic” about its benefits to wildlife.
Banner image of a traditional Chinese medicine shop by mailer-diablo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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