The analysis was quite complicated, partly because the scientists controlled for changes in demand. The research is the first to show that a non-timber forest product can have a backward-bending supply curve. Photo by Gary Kauffman, USFS.įrey led a recent study published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics. A team of USDA Forest Service researchers has shown that the species has a backward-bending supply curve. “It’s not a very common outcome in economic studies.” Wild American ginseng harvests keep falling, even as prices rise. “It’s a very narrow set of conditions that allow a resource to operate with a backward-bending supply curve,” says Frey. (Most commercial marine fish species reach reproductive maturity in less than two years and can produce large quantities of eggs each year). Plants must be at least five years old before they begin to reproduce.

Ginseng plants face biological limits on reproduction.

“If I take a hike, you can still hike, too.” “It’s not like hiking, for example,” says Frey.

The harvest is rivalrous – once a wild ginseng plant is harvested, it is gone.

Functionally, ginseng is an open-access resource, even though it is not open-access in the legal sense. Ginseng has several things in common with marine fisheries: But wild ginseng has appeared to violate that law in recent years.īackward-bending supply curves were identified in the 1950s, in the context of marine fisheries. This relationship is so common that economists call it the Law of Supply. Typically, as the price of a product increases, producers supply a larger quantity for sale. Supply curves show how price and quantity are related. “It indicates a backward-bending supply curve.”

“It’s pretty unusual that the more effort put towards producing something, the less is produced,” says USDA Forest Service researcher Greg Frey. But the average harvest amount has dwindled, while price has skyrocketed. Tens of thousands of pounds are harvested from the wild each year.

Illustration by Jacob Bigelow, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.Īmerican ginseng ( Panax quinquefolius) is a plant of great value. It is also used in Chinese medicine and has been exported since the mid-1700s. Notably, in vivo experiments confirmed that FG had a stronger anti-aging activity than GG.Indigenous people used wild American ginseng for many purposes. GG and FG also restored the diversity and structure of gut microbiota, up-regulated the relative abundance of beneficial bacteria (e.g., Lactobacillus), and tended to exert key anti-aging effects via the microbiota-gut-brain axis. What's more, GG and FG treatment ameliorated excessive apoptosis and inflammatory reaction in the aging brain by modulating apoptosis-related proteins, PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway, and SIRT1/NF-κB pathway. GG and FG improved hippocampal lesions and poor weight gain, organ indices, and behavioral indices, and prevented excessive oxidative stress and acetylcholinesterase activity in aging mice. The absolute contents of total ginsenosides, polyphenols, crude polysaccharides, starch, and protein in GG were 0.71, 0.68, 1.15, 2.27, and 1.08 folds higher than those in FG, respectively while FG exhibited a higher relative abundance of representative active ingredients (total ginsenosides, polyphenols, crude polysaccharides, and protein) but lower relative content of starch than GG.

Marchen forest ginseng