Socioeconomic Values of Herbal Medicine

The use of herbal medicines and herbal products has significantly increased in recent times and contributes to the socioeconomic sustainability of the rural and suburban populace. The socioeconomic importance of herbal medicine includes addressing health issues, revenue generation, cultural development, insights for novel medication development, and indigenous knowledge sharing and exchanges. The commercialization of medicinal plants enables traders in the locality to offer their products and expertise at a fair and reasonable price, thereby, making returns to support their family and community. Every aspect of herbal medicine formulation and use value chain (i.e., cultivation harvesting, processing, formulation, packaging, sale, use, and waste disposal) has diverse socioeconomic relevance from the local to global scale. However, the value chain sequence varies at different scales. For instance, at the local scale, it may be from smallholder markets to national and international trade with varying levels of actors along the sequence. Apart from their economic values, medicinal plants also serve as a source of employment and sustainable sourcing and stimulate quality control of the medicinal product. An innovative approach to subvert the increasing length of the value chain, the blockchain approach, can be employed. The concept of blockchain replaces the analog ledger approach, and it is a system that is built on decentralized data storage on several users, each forming a network node. This review, therefore, elaborates on the economic importance, value chain, recent approaches, and quality control of herbal medicine plants and products for sustainable production.