[With
prices topping $50,000 a pound in China’s coastal megacities, harvesting of the
fungus has helped to curb endemic poverty in the Himalayas, which stretch
across Nepal, northern India, Bhutan, Tibet and China. For hundreds of
thousands of people living in remote villages, selling yarsagumba has become a
primary source of income.]
By Kai Schultz
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Harvesters crawled while
picking caterpillar fungus on the Tibetan Plateau in May.
The caterpillar fungus,
also known as yarsagumba or Himalayan Viagra, thrives in
high altitudes with low
temperature. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
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BAGDANDA,
Nepal — From a pasture high
in the Himalayas, Tulsingh Rokaya, 55, a shepherd, watched for years as the
number of itinerant harvesters swelled.
They came in search of what is known as
caterpillar fungus, or yarsagumba in Nepali. A parasitic fungus, it forms out
of the head of ghost moth larvae living in the soil at altitudes above 10,000 feet,
and has been used as an aphrodisiac for at least a thousand years, earning it
the nickname Himalayan Viagra.
In the 1980s, the pickers used to trade the
fungus for cigarettes and noodles. But as yarsagumba grew in popularity, it
exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry spanning China, Singapore and the
United States.
During the picking season, which runs from
late May to July, the number of harvesters in Bagdanda and two neighboring
camps has often reached several thousands of people. But this season, with the
fungus becoming scarce, the number is down to the hundreds.
They still hike from a camp below, carrying
metal picks to dig out the fungus, helping to produce an average regional
harvest of 135 tons a year. Occasionally, they stop at Mr. Rokaya’s tent to buy
sheep’s curd. Most of the time they pass through, teetering on a steep hillside
where they spend the morning hunched over to find the fungus’s crooked black
stem poking through the dirt.
Folklore has it that interest in the fungus
stems from the startling performance of Chinese runners at an international
track meet in 1993, which their coach attributed to their consumption of a soup
combining the fungus with turtle blood. (Western competitors suspected
something less exotic, namely performance-enhancing drugs.)
With prices topping $50,000 a pound in
China’s coastal megacities, harvesting of the fungus has helped to curb endemic
poverty in the Himalayas, which stretch across Nepal, northern India, Bhutan,
Tibet and China. For hundreds of thousands of people living in remote villages,
selling yarsagumba has become a primary source of income.
A study by Nepal’s central bank found that
harvesters earned an average of about $2,500, or 56 percent of their yearly
income, selling the fungus. Money from yarsagumba has given some of the world’s
most impoverished people access to electricity, hospital care and education.
“The whole Tibetan plateau is by now
completely dependent on the cash influx,” said Daniel Winkler, a mycologist who
has studied the caterpillar fungus extensively in Tibet. He estimated that over
one million people in Tibet sell the fungus.
But as quickly as demand for the fungus has
surged, its supply has dropped sharply. Mycologists studying the fungus point
to overharvesting as one reason. But another possible cause, some researchers
now believe, is a warmer ecosystem precipitated by climate change, a phenomenon
that may be more acute at higher altitudes.
“There are strong theoretical reasons as to
why we might expect the rate of climate change to be faster higher up in the
mountains than it is at sea level,” said Nicholas Pepin, a geographer at the
University of Portsmouth in England.
Some of the most compelling data comes from
the Tibetan plateau, where from 2001 to 2012, the increase in temperatures was
between half a degree Fahrenheit and nearly an entire degree at weather
stations above 10,000 feet. In the same decade, global temperatures rose by
only about 0.2 degrees.
Scientists say it is unclear why mountain
ranges may be warming more rapidly than other parts of the planet. But Kamaljit
Bawa, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said failure to
better understand warming in the Himalayas could have serious consequences for
the region’s unique biodiversity.
“We have to make very rapid progress,” he
said. “We can’t use the slow approach, the traditional, slow scientific
approach.”
Not for yarsagumba, apparently.
As harvesters returned from the pastures to
Bagdanda on a recent afternoon, children gathered in the camp’s dusty
thoroughfare and divided teams for a volleyball game. A mother held down her
squirming daughter to pick lice from her scalp. Men congregated on trash-strewn
dirt mounds and peeled strips of kutki, an herb used to treat vomiting and fever.
In a village below the meadows, Prithvi
Budha, 60, a beekeeper who is sitting out the harvest to watch dozens of empty
mud and stone huts, said less precipitation might be the cause for the drop in
yarsagumba supplies.
“We used to have snow up to here and up to
here,” he said, pointing to his torso and his shoulders as he recalled a string
of childhood winters.
Uttam Shrestha, a researcher at the
University of Southern Queensland in Australia, said it was difficult to say
why the supply of yarsagumba had dropped. Changes in temperature, he said,
could be one of several factors affecting the supply of the fungus.
“We can draw some inferences,” he said.
“Here, the fungus is very sensitive to the increase in temperature and so that
could have an impact, but there is no empirical evidence yet.”
Jir Bahadur Budha, 43, a farmer, said he was
disappointed with this year’s harvest. He estimated that his family of six
would collect only 400 pieces of yarsagumba, 200 fewer than last year and 500
fewer than the year before. The selling price for a single piece is about $3.50
in Nepal.
On a recent morning, Mr. Budha joined dozens
of others in a pasture as a heavy fog set in. Within 10 minutes of searching,
calls echoed from a few hundred feet away, where a teenager had spotted one of
the day’s first pieces. Clawing away dirt from the larva’s body, the boy
received a smattering of congratulations. He had found a good piece.
“Only lucky people find yarsagumba in the
morning,” one man said.
Mr. Rokaya, the shepherd, was cautious in his
appraisal of the day’s pickings. Whatever the reason for the decline in
yarsagumba, he said, it may be too late to salvage what has been lost.
“No jobs. No money. What to do?” he said,
thrumming his fingers on a gnarled cane. “We eat the rice that even donkeys and
horses don’t eat.”
