The Importance of Keeping Alive Sustainable Foraging Practices: Wild Vegetables and Herbs Gathered by Afghan Refugees Living in Mansehra District, Pakistan

Abstract

The issue of foraging for wild food plants among migrants and relocated communities is an important one in environmental studies, especially in order to understand how human societies rearrange their practices linked to nature and how they adapt to new socioecological systems. This paper addresses the complexity of Traditional/Local Environmental Knowledge (LEK) changes associated to wild vegetables and herbs across four different groups of Afghan refugees living in Mansehra District, NW Pakistan, since 1985. Via interviews with eighty study participants, forty-eight wild vegetables and herbs were recorded, representing both the past and present wild plant gastronomic heritage. The majority of the quoted wild plant ingredients were only remembered and no longer actively used, thus suggesting an important erosion of LEK. Moreover, the number of wild vegetables and herbs currently used by Afghan Pashtuns engaged in farming activities is much higher than those reported by the other groups. The findings indicate that practiced LEK, i.e., knowledge that is continuously kept alive via constant contact with the natural environment, is essential for the resilience of the biocultural heritage, which is, however, also influenced by the rearrangement of social life adopted by refugees after relocation.

Plant Resources Utilization among Different Ethnic Groups of Ladakh in Trans-Himalayan Region

“…The overharvesting of underground parts or whole plants should be discouraged, especially in the case of threatened species, as this practice causes elimination and dwindling of the plant’s status in the wild [ 43 , 63 ]. Our findings are also supported by Ahmad et al [ 64 ], Sharif et al [ 65 ], Siddique et al [ 66 ], Anwer et al [ 67 ], and Manduzai et al [ 68 ] from the Pakistan Himalayas; and Debbarma et al [ 45 ] and Krupa et al [ 69 ] from India. Asif et al [ 28 ] and Haq et al [ 48 ] from the Kashmiri Himalayas, India; Pala et al [ 46 ] from the Eastern Himalayas; Singh et al [ 70 ] from the Western Himalayas, India; and Tiwari et al [ 71 ] from the Kumaun Himalayas, India.…”

The trauma of no-choice: Wild food ethnobotany in Yaghnobi and Tajik villages, Varzob Valley, Tajikistan

“…In the case of Zumand, the element of freedom was completely absent, as people were relocated with brutal force, overnight, and put into unhospitable and unknown environments, destroying the safety net of the community. We observed similar symptoms of trauma among the Kurds of Azerbaijan, who were relocated from the mountain region to the plains of inland Azerbaijan during the armed conflict in Nagorny Karabakh (Pieroni and Sõukand 2016) and among Afgani migrants in Pakistan (Manduzai et al 2021).…”

Disadvantaged Economic Conditions and Stricter Border Rules Shape Afghan Refugees’ Ethnobotany: Insights from Kohat District, NW Pakistan

“…On this matter, some authors (among them [ 7 ]) have argued that sometimes the health policies of host countries substantially follow assimilationist principles, according to which migrating communities should adopt the ideas and habits of the majority group of the host society. Recently, some authors of this paper [ 8 ] suggested that the prolonged stay of Afghan Pathans in refugee camps in Mansehra District, Pakistan may lead to the erosion of their LEK related to wild food plants and herbs, as exposure to natural resources is very restricted in the camps. In order to further investigate this issue, we decided to look in more detail at the overall ethnobotany of Afghan refugees in Kohat District, NW Pakistan.…”