The cultivation of wild food and medicinal plants for improving community livelihood: The case of the Buhozi site, DR Congo

Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate the effect of farming technology on introducing medicinal plants (MP) and wild food plants (WFP) into a traditional agricultural system within peri-urban zones. Field investigations and semi-structured focus group interviews conducted in the Buhozi community showed that 27 health and nutrition problems dominated in the community, and could be treated with 86 domestic plant species. The selected domestic MP and WFP species were collected in the broad neighboring areas of the Buhozi site, and introduced to the experimental field of beans and maize crops in Buhozi. Among the 86 plants introduced, 37 species are confirmed as having both medicinal and nutritional properties, 47 species with medicinal, and 2 species with nutritional properties. The field is arranged in a way that living hedges made from Tithonia diversifolia provide bio-fertilizers to the plants growing along the hedges. The harvest of farming crops does not disturb the MP or WFP, and vice-versa. After harvesting the integrated plants, the community could gain about 40 times higher income, than from harvesting farming crops only. This kind of field may be used throughout the year, to provide both natural medicines and foods. It may therefore contribute to increasing small-scale crop producers' livelihood, while promoting biodiversity conservation. This model needs to be deeply documented, for further pharmaceutical and nutritional use.

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“…In our ethnobotanical survey, 53 plants from 43 Asteraceae and Fabaceae constitute respectively the second and the third family of flowering plants known worldwide [73] and Fabaceae only, the largest family of trees in tropical dry forests of Africa [74] . In addition, ethnobotanical studies carried out in the region [17,18,24,25,27,75,76] report the preponderance of Fabaceae and Asteraceae with very variable frequencies (5-23%); The results observed in this study (table 1) are therefore part of the general trend. Note also that this preponderance of Fabaceae accounts not only for the importance of this family in traditional Congolese medicine for the management of several pathologies such as diabetes [77] , sickle cell anemia [78] , schistosomiasis [79] , dental caries [80] or diarrhea [81] .…”

“…It would be difficult to have a definite point of view on the issue. About morphological type, the analysis of several ethnobotanical studies of the region [17,24,28] show, as in this study, that most of the plants used in traditional medicine in Bukavu are trees (figure 3).…”

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