Why is this happening to our precious trees people? Wild Harvesting is meant to be a sustainable and ethical way of collecting our fruits.
Mayi Harvests Native Foods holds all the appropriate licences to harvest and sell our native foods from our lands. Our family members mostly harvest our fruits and we also purchase fruit from a small group of local experienced harvesters that we have either trained, informed or inducted with all the correct land management and traditional wild harvesting protocols. However we are finding that many untrained new harvesters that are picking for other businesses are doing damage that we cannot control and this situation has become so damaging that we are needing to have rangers monitoring our lands.
PBC is planning towards having rangers on country in the near future to ensure people are following ethical and sustainable standards. This should not be happening and people need to have more respect and pride for country. If this keeps happening we won't have fruit for our future generations.
Listen to this radio interview below about this destructive situation we are facing.
By Vanessa Mills on Breakfast
Duration: 6min 5secBroadcast: Tue 28 Jan 2020, 6:30am
A small green plum with the world's highest vitamin C content has long been in hot demand by the health food and cosmetics industries.
It's only available for a short season, usually after heavy after rains, on the Terminalia ferdinandiana tree, commonly called Gubinge or Kakadu Plum and which command high prices per kilo.
Groups of pickers are currently harvesting from trees in the bush and neighbourhoods around Broome, Derby and the Dampier Peninsula, keen to collect as much of the lucrative fruit as possible.
But reports are emerging of vandalised trees, snapped and twisted branches and even chainsaws being used.
Comments