How are wild plants important to people’s survival in the Global South? Can wild plants help rural families to escape poverty? How is this playing out in remote mountain areas - how does sex in China drive the transformation of agrarian societies in the Himalayas? Is trade in wild plants driving species to the brink of extinction? Are rural poor harvesters getting a fair share of the trade profit?

Globalisation is a term which everyone is used to hearing but do we grasp what it actually entails? How is our consumption of a can of tuna which we buy in the supermarket dependent on other people’s economies in another part of the planet? Globalisation is reducing the importance of physical distance on earth, for instance through changes in communication and transport and this has led to the interconnectedness of people’s consumption behaviour and livelihoods across geographies.

Plants are important to each single person on the planet. Carsten Smith-Hall will present research documenting the economic importance of wild plants to rural households in the Global South. Focusing on commercial medicinal plants from the Himalayas, he will show how increasing household incomes in China and India are fuelling demand for plants harvested in high altitude rural villages and how this is changing people’s way of living.

Afterwards, dry-ice cocktails and the Søvnterapeuterne, composed of the human acid-trip Mikkel Bajer in cahoots with emotion-pathologist Charlie Andersen, will recreate some of their self-effacing shortcuts to higher self-awareness of life's fine knife edge with the help of the death-violin and trance-guitar.

Photo: Assam Tourism