Nepal's High-Altitude Gold: The Unseen Lives of Yarsagumba Collectors
The harvest of Yarsagumba (Himalayan gold) is a critical annual trek for Nepali communities, providing the main source of cash income from a rare fungus highly valued in traditional medicine. Despite the extreme conditions and unpredictable search, the income is vital for local survival. To combat challenges like illegal trade and low returns, TRAFFIC's Scaling Conservation of Himalayan Plants and Fungi project focuses on establishing equitable and traceable supply chains to ensure harvesters receive a fairer financial benefit from their sustainable resource management.
Each May, Pranisha Pun and Amrimaya Pun leave Maikot village in western Nepal for a two-day trek into the high-altitude pastures of the Dhorpatan Hunting Reserve. Their goal: to harvest Yarsagumba Ophiocordyceps sinensis, a rare caterpillar fungus known as “Himalayan gold,” which provides vital income for their families.
At around 4,000 metres, harvesters set up temporary camps and begin daily climbs to even higher elevations. The hunt is gruelling; thin air, freezing temperatures, and steep terrain make each step a challenge. As they climb, they pause at stone shrines in Deurali to pray for luck.
The fungus is identified by a tiny mushroom tip poking through the soil, and spotting one is a moment of shared joy. Yarsagumba, or Cordyceps, has for a long time been a highly prized ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine and there is growing evidence that its valuable medicinal properties could help fight cancer, assist the immune system, and be beneficial for gut-health, as well as having antioxidant properties.
The value of each find depends on its size and colour, with larger, golden-yellowish specimens fetching higher prices. But the search is unpredictable. “Sometimes you don’t find even one all day,” says Amrimaya. “Other times, you might find fifteen or sixteen.”
There is a lot at stake: the quantities of Yarsagumba gathered during these few weeks in the harsh mountaintop pastures determines outcomes for entire households for the rest of the year.
Yarsagumba is a major source of cash income in these remote highland communities, especially for women. The money earned goes primarily toward food, education, and religious donations, investments in human and social capital. Religious giving, part of a local “economy of merit,” boosts social status and community bonds.
Despite the severe conditions, the resilience of these communities is striking. One staff member from ANSAB Nepal, a project partner working on the ground to promote sustainable harvesting, recalled seeing women in traditional Saree playing volleyball at 4,300 metres, a testament to their strength and spirit.
However, the challenges remain: due to lack of legal awareness, even experienced NTFP traders may be unaware of the restrictions surrounding protected areas, and can be caught and forced to abandon their life’s work. Another concern is the decline of invaluable traditional medicinal knowledge, with the younger generations increasingly migrating away from the highlands.
Local communities, for their part, have begun to address some of these issues: they are forming their own trader groups to facilitate legal trade and negotiate better prices.
The Scaling Conservation of Himalayan Plants and Fungi project, led by TRAFFIC and partners including ANSAB Nepal, Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal (FECOFUN), WWF India, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), University of Oxford, Tribhuvan University and FairWild Foundation is directly tackling the underlying pressures on both people and nature. The project's strategy moves beyond local harvesting to drive change across the international supply chains in markets like China and Hong Kong that drive most of the demand for Yarsagumba.
The core goal is to establish traceable and equitable supply chains for wild harvested NTFPs, thereby ensuring a greater, fairer return reaches the harvesters for livelihood improvement. This initiative strengthens the value chain from the mountains of Nepal through training local producer companies and harvesters on sustainable resource management, implementing pilot traceability systems to secure legal trade, facilitating adoption of sustainability standards such as FairWild certification, and organising matchmaking events to connect local producers with responsible international buyers.
Bryony Morgan - SENIOR PROGRAMME MANAGER – HIMALAYAN NTFPs
For now, the villagers continue their annual pilgrimage, balancing tradition with modern pressures. Each tiny fungus they find carries the hope of another year of survival—and the preservation of a way of life deeply rooted in the mountains.
About the Darwin Initiative
The Darwin Initiative is a UK government programme with a focus on biodiversity projects.
About Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources (ANSAB)
Established in 1992, ANSAB has a vision of rural South Asia built on rich biodiversity and prosperous communities. This vision includes rich, healthy and productive ecosystems actively managed and sustainably used by formerly poor local communities. It also features adaptive people and resilient ecosystems able to cope with global climate change. Generate and implement community-based, enterprise-oriented solutions that conserve biodiversity and improve the livelihoods of the poorest of the poor while bolstering national economic development and addressing climate change is the mission of ANSAB.
ANSAB has implemented conservation and development programmes in more than 30 districts of Nepal and provided policy inputs and services to the government and development partners in seven Asian countries. ANSAB has introduced FSC certification in Nepal, supported enterprises in achieving organic and wildlife-friendly certification, supported NTFPs collector groups and producer enterprises for their management practices complying with FairWild standards, and led successful on-the ground implementation of the UKAID funded Darwin Initiative project 25-018. After the successful implementation of the project 25-018, UKAID funded Darwin Initiative program further provided the project 28-026 for the upscaling of the successes.
About WWF
WWF is an independent conservation organisation, with over 30 million supporters and a global network active in over 100 countries. WWF's mission is to stop the degradation of the Earth's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature, by conserving the world's biological diversity, ensuring that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable, and promoting the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption. For latest news and media resources, see panda.org/news
About FairWild
The increasing demand for wild plants—as ingredients for food, cosmetics, well-being and medicinal products—poses major ecological and social challenges. The pressure on potentially vulnerable plant species can endanger local ecosystems and the livelihoods of collectors, who often belong to the poorest social groups in the countries of origin.
As a response to these concerns, the FairWild Foundation is working with partners worldwide to improve the conservation, management and sustainable use of wild plants in trade, as well as the livelihoods of rural harvesters involved in wild collection. TRAFFIC has supported the development of the FairWild Standard, and now hosts the organization’s Secretariat under a partnership agreement.
About FECOFUN
The Federation of Community Forestry User’s Nepal (FECOFUN) is a non-governmental organization that includes Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) across the country with offices at the local and provincial level. FECOFUN emphasizes the importance of linking community forest user groups and the role they play in strengthening the rights, roles and responsibilities of users in policy-making processes. FECOFUN works at the grassroots and community level with a focus on sustainable natural resource management (NRM), community rights, gender equity, social inclusion, justice and prosperity. Since its establishment in 1995, FECOFUN has grown into a social movement organization with about 14 million people, all of whom are forest users. FECOFUN’s goal is to promote and protect the rights of community forest users through capacity strengthening, economic empowerment, sustainable natural resource management, technical support, policy advocacy, policy development and networking. All while upholding the values of inclusive democracy, institutional rights, prosperity, gender equity, and social justice.
