Department for Forest and Soil Sciences Institute of Forest Ecology Head of Institute: Ao. Prof. Klaus Katzensteiner Advisors: Prof. Gerhard Glatzel Prof. Christian R. Vogl Dr. Steven Franzel Dr. Ramni Jamnadass MEDICINAL TREES IN SMALLHOLDER AGROFORESTRY SYSTEMS: ASSESSING SOME FACTORS INFLUENCING CULTIVATION BY FARMERS EAST OF MT KENYA Dissertation for obtaining a doctorate degree at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna Submitted by Jonathan Muriuki H0741100 (MSc Agroforestry) Vienna, January 2011 Acknowledgements The recipient of a college degree is usually the embodiment of efforts by many individuals and institutions that work together to prop him to success. I am privileged to have received so much support in the course of this journey that words can never fully express my appreciation. I will first gladly submit to the authority of the Almighty God and give Him thanks for his support and grace in all these efforts. He deserves all the glory. To OEAD, your support has been awesome. It is not usual to find a sponsor who is with you every step of the way and who avails all resources deemed necessary to make you feel at home, away from home, and yet that is what OEAD did to us scholars. Members of staff Katharina Engel, Elke Stinnig, Heike Kernbauer, Martina Rahberger, Julie Hartl and all the others gave a very personalised support to me from the days of scholarship application to the study finalisation period. It is hard to imagine that all OEAD scholars receive that kind of support and at times one feels like he is particularly favoured. Thank you for the times you have had to intervene at other institutions that I had to deal with in order to ensure as smooth a flow of my study as could possibly be created. The Institute of Forest Ecology at BOKU was my home in Austria. My professor Gerhard Glatzel offered me unreserved support and was it not for you this process would neither have started nor gone anywhere. From that simple interaction with you when you travelled to Kenya in 2006, through the application process, to the study time you played a pivotal role. You had to make time out of your very tight schedules to attend to my requests and I‟m grateful. Other professors at the Institute especially Professors Herbert Hager, Georg Gratzer and Monika Sieghardt also offered support in very friendly manner. Ms. Melanie Geitheinrich and Victoria Iby gave administrative support and even had to translate communication from German whenever I requested them. Other members of the institute including Martin and fellow students Belayneh, Tesfaye, Biruktayet, Lelisa, Ajara and Bojana offered a very collegial place to study. To you all and other members of the institute I give many thanks. Thank you Professor Christian R. Vogl for accepting to be my second advisor and making time to meet me even sometimes way before or after formal office hours. The many insights you gave about social science research methodology and analysis are embedded in memory and will serve me long after this thesis has been published. At ICRAF I‟m most indebted to Dr. Tony Simons for the encouragement to undertake PhD studies and facilitating the process of scholarship application and admission at BOKU. Thanks also go to my ICRAF advisors Drs. Ramni Jamnadass and Steven Franzel. You took time off busy schedules to shape my drafts from the proposal to the thesis level. All other 2 ICRAF staff that reviewed my drafts such as Drs. Roeland Kindt, Ian Dawson, Jeremias Mowo and Richard Coe, your help is most appreciated. Thank you GIS unit for the maps you developed for this work and staff at ICRAF Meru Ms. Sallyannie Muhoro and Susan Kimani for the support while in the field. Off course the real work in the field was done by the indefatigable research team comprising of Alexander Munyi, David Mathenge, Fredrick Maingi, Silas Muthuri, Benard Ndirangu and Paul Kithinji who joined me at various times in the two field study sessions and provided valuable input in surveys and measurements. My other colleagues at ICRAF who encouraged me when at times I almost gave up, Caleb, Alexious, Dennis, Joyce, Agnes, Grace, Pauline and others, I can never thank you enough. And then Sammy Carsan and Stepha McMullin who were sweating it out with me as fellow PhD students in ICRAF as well as close colleagues. My stay in Austria would have been difficult if it was not for a few devoted friends to whom I owe much gratitude. Thank you Eric Bett for being like a brother to me, Edward Muge, Esau, Caroline, Nicholas, Berita, Mastewal and many others from Vienna Christian Centre and Kenyan embassy in Austria especially Nicholas and Esther. Special mention goes to Pastor Tom Manning and the entire leadership of the Vienna Christian Centre for taking care of my spiritual needs and giving me balance in a spinning world when I was away from Nairobi Pentecostal Church, Ngong, my spiritual home. May God bless you and expand that ministry. Last but most important I would like to thank my wife Esther, my daughter Grace and son Victor Brian for the sacrifice they have had to offer in this course. I started taking time off the family when my son was barely able to understand why I was going and I can feel his tears when he could cry through school day wondering why Daddy had to go. To you family, I also dedicate this work. Thanks also go to my parents and members of the extended family from both sides, friends (especially Ken, Dan, Genesio and their families), the leadership and members of my church for the support you gave to my family during the times I travelled to Austria. Whatever you did to any of those little ones, you did it to me and God remembers. Words will never be enough to thank you. May God reward you all. 3 Dedication To my grandparents Martha (paternal) and Daniel (maternal) for staying around to see this accomplished and to Henry Kiambati the herbalist who was very instrumental in facilitating herbalist interviews in Meru but could not live through to see the results of this study (RIP). 4 Abstract (English) Low health standards in the developing world call for multifaceted health management approaches which include traditional medicine. Traditional medicine in Africa, often self administered but mostly relying on consulting traditional healers (herbalists), derives materia medica mainly from medicinal plants. Trees constitute about 75% of these plants but many useful species are threatened in natural forests due to rising demand and competing land uses. Farm lands present the new frontiers to conserve these species as part of tropical agroforestry systems. Rising trade in medicinal plant products can also provide an extra source of income when farmers are linked to markets. However smallholder farmers are faced with multiple production constraints, especially diminishing farm sizes and success of medicinal tree conservation on farms will depend on several factors. The main objective of this study, therefore, was to investigate the influence of farmers„ knowledge of species„ medicinal value, access to herbal medicinal product markets, availability of tree planting materials and knowledge of cultivation ecology on medicinal tree cultivation. The study was conducted in the Mt. Kenya East area of Kenya and used survey method to generate data. First, 200 farmers, 60 herbalists, 60 tree nursery operators and 55 urban herbal medicine traders were interviewed on their perspectives on medicinal tree cultivation. An ecological survey was later conducted to determine the abundance of priority medicinal tree species in natural forests, farms and herbalist gardens. Data was analyzed through SPSS for interview responses and BiodiversityR for species abundance details. ANOVA was used to interpret differences in perspectives of respondents in socio-demographic categories (gender, age and level of education attained) and the districts where they came from. Results showed that farmers and herbalists had established many medicinal species in their farms but less than thirty were highly preferred and present in many farms. Farmers were mostly influenced by knowledge of medicinal value of a species and availabilty of markets for medicinal tree products when planting or saving species in their farms. Herbalists considered species that treated many diseases and were getting scarce as the highest priority for cultivation. Farmers‟ knowledge of medicinal species increased with age of respondent and decreased with level of education attained. Farmers from Mbeere district knew more medicinal tree species than those from Embu and Meru central districts. The knowledge was passed on from older relatives and only a quarter of farmers had learned about use of medicinal trees from herbalists. Knowledge of medicinal species associated strongly with the number of medicinal tree species present in farms but less strongly with the number of species that farmers had deliberately planted. Interviews with traders portrayed a rising trade in medicinal tree products, with many indigenous species sourced from the wild. The preference of forest to farm sourced herbal 5 material was not associated with the ecological conditions of the source and there was likelihood for many traders, especially those involved in production of retailable herbal products, to use more of farm grown plants in future. Availing more medicinal tree species„ seedlings in tree nurseries would not raise the cultivation levels of medicinal trees, especially when farmers had poor access to product markets and the seedlings were offered at a price. Highly preferred species were found to be more abundant in herbalist gardens than forests and other farms. The trees had also been recently planted showing a trend of increased planting of priority medicinal plant species by herbalists as the species became increasingly scarce in forests.