Two years ago, company Herbal Montenegro from Niksic started the project “Promotion of Good Collective Practice, Education and Licensing of Medicinal Herbs and Forest Fertilizers”. Slavoljub Tasic from the Belgrade Institute “Josif Pancic”, gave a lecture on sustainable collecting, drying and storage of medicinal plants.
We need special attention to how and when we collect the plants, whether we know it well, whether we have dried it well, packed it, processed it, marked it. It is an important chain, from the meadow to the plant, so that the product is what it should be”,Tasic said.
Experience has shown, he said, that people from rural and suburban areas are better acquainted with medicinal herbs than those who live in the city.
“The city has separated the man from nature and people from the city don’t recognize the herbs so well, so they do not dare to work and deal with it,” Tasic explaines.
Jovanka Stanisic from Ozrinici has been collecting herbs for almost four decades, exclusively for personal use.
“I have a collection of thirty different teas. It’s just for home use. Since I was born and raised in the village, married and living in Ozrinici, I know quite well the herbs”, Stanisic said.
She and other collectors who attended the lecture at Tehnopolis, as well as the Tuzla gatherers for whom the lecture was held in the afternoon, received a certificate. In August a field visit and a practical part of education on the habitats in the territory of Podgorica, Bar, Ulcinj, Zabljak And Pluzine will be held.
“In the first two years, over 120 collectors from Tuzla and Danilovgrad went through education. Now we started with the Niksic municipality and again with the municipality of Tuzi for the concentration of medicinal herbs that are most interesting for us”, said Jelena Zizic, director of Herbal Montenegro.
According to her, last year they managed to break into the market of Europe and the Germans, Italians, Czechs and Englishmen are interested in buying medicinal herbs from Montenegro.
“The buyers are interested in wormwood or sage, and this year we received great demands for lime, velvet, yarrow and St. John’s Wort,” Zizic said.
The goal of the lecture is to inform the collectors about the correct and sustainable use of medicinal herbs from nature, and after the completion of the five-year project, the creation of a registry of educated and licensed collectors is planned.
“For two years, in cooperation with the Municipality of Niksic, the city municipality of Tuzi, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Agency for Environmental Protection, we will implement this project, and in the end we will establish a register of educated and licensed collectors so that we can control the collection of herbs from the national level”, concluded Zizic.
