Financial support
Since April 2010, 50 euro cents for every Titripac® package sold has gone to support an innovative sustainability project at the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve. The idea to finance a meaningful sustainability project as part of the global campaign instead of offering customer rebates or giving away promotional items came from Product Manager Bettina Straub-Jubb. As she explains, “The connection between the campaign and a biosphere reserve is obvious, since the focus here is on nature and mankind in harmony and on sustainable development. In addition to protecting nature, our support enables us to give the population an opportunity for autonomous development.” Representatives of the German UNESCO Commission came to Darmstadt in March 2010 to seal the partnership with Merck. “We felt it was important to work with a reliable, non-commercially oriented partner. At the same time, it needed to be a project with which our Merck companies and our customers worldwide could identify, and through which we could achieve a lasting result,” said Straub-Jubb.
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Since April 2010, 50 euro cents for every Titripac® package sold has gone to support an innovative sustainability project at the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve. The idea to finance a meaningful sustainability project as part of the global campaign instead of offering customer rebates or giving away promotional items came from Product Manager Bettina Straub-Jubb. As she explains, “The connection between the campaign and a biosphere reserve is obvious, since the focus here is on nature and mankind in harmony and on sustainable development. In addition to protecting nature, our support enables us to give the population an opportunity for autonomous development.” Representatives of the German UNESCO Commission came to Darmstadt in March 2010 to seal the partnership with Merck. “We felt it was important to work with a reliable, non-commercially oriented partner. At the same time, it needed to be a project with which our Merck companies and our customers worldwide could identify, and through which we could achieve a lasting result,” said Straub-Jubb.
The money received is to be used to help establish a medicinal plants garden that will benefit the traditional healer as well as the population of the region, both economically and culturally. “The role and the rights of the traditional healer with respect to the sustainable conservation of resources have already been defined as part of this complex project. The project uses and preserves knowledge of traditional medicinal plants, and the medicinal plant garden is intended to make a very real contribution to stabilizing the overused environment and to provide the residents with an economic basis,” explains Lutz Möller, Head of the Section for Science and Human Rights of the German Commission for UNESCO. Furthermore, the project should be largely self-supporting financially through carbon dioxide compensation payments from tourists in the biosphere reserve. This sensational project has already won international awards and will help to preserve the valuable ecosystem in Kruger to Canyons.
Traditional healers at the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve
Image {count} of {total}| The Establishment of the Medicinal Plants Garden |
| The UNESCO Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve has long worked with traditional healers. Multiple partners have been working together on a project since 2009 with the aim of restoring the overused environment. With the help of Merck, funding is now in place for the first steps toward the establishment of a medicinal plant garden, in which medicinal plants are grown as much as possible under natural conditions to stabilize the vegetation in the Bushbuckridge region. The group of 80 traditional healers participating in the project will also use the garden as a center and conference site. The healers were also trained in the sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants and familiarized with intellectual property rights. To make it easier for them to negotiate with researchers and companies, the project partners jointly developed a biocultural protocol that specified the healers’ needs and the further procedure in writing, making this a pilot project in “Access and Benefit Sharing”. This concept from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which was ratified in Nagoya, Japan, in late October 2010, aims at allowing developing nations to share appropriately in revenue from patents based on the biological resources of these countries. |
