Certified Wild Plant Gathering (in Organic Farming): Sustainability, Food Safety, Compliance and Supply Chains

Dear Colleagues,

A large diversity of organically certified products include ingredients from wild plant species, but consumers, stakeholders and even experts of organic farming are frequently not aware of it. Indeed, around 40% of the total areas certified for organic farming on a global scale are not dedicated to cultivation but to wild plant gathering (including beekeeping). Wild plants can be certified as organic products if gathering areas have not been treated with products forbidden in organic farming for three consecutive years and when the gathering does not impair the stability of habitat and maintenance of species. Supporting local communities all over the world in generating income, organically certified wild plant species enter a wide range of value chains, from simple and local to highly complex and international. The resulting organic products are farm-made and industrial organic foods, superfoods, cosmetics and medicinals including flowers, leaves, fruits, roots and seeds from wild plants. Organic consumers frequently buy these products without being aware of the origin of the ingredients and in line with the limited acknowledgement of organically certified wild plant gathering in public discourses, reliable information about “organic gathering” and its sustainability is hardly available. Whereas organic is the most widespread certification scheme for wild plant products, the lack of information is equally relevant for other schemes, including FairWild, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Program for the Endorsement of the Forest Certification (PEFC) and others.

This Special Issue calls for papers that contribute to balancing this discrepancy between the pronounced importance of certified gathering and the little reliable knowledge available, and will assemble studies that address a variety of related topics. These topics include, but are not limited to, the ecological, socio-economic and political sustainability of certified wild plant gathering; biodiversity conservation; local knowledge and ethnobotany; food safety and nutritional value; certification standards and processes; sustainable value chains; and sustainable consumption.

Papers selected for this Special Issue benefit from high visibility and wide dissemination.

Prof. Dr. Christian R. Vogl
Dr. Christoph Schunko
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.