Medicinal plant material is used by a large number of industries including pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, detergents, dyes, insecticides, foods and paints. Demand for medicinal plants is undoubtedly increasing in the medicinal and health-related sectors and this growth is fuelling an increase in both the number of species and volume of plant material being traded. It is estimated that some 10,000 plant species are used medicinally with only a relatively small number of species used in significant volume. Medicinal and aromatic plants are traded both as unprocessed plant material and as processed final products. Demand for a wide variety of species is increasing as these markets expand and new end uses are developed. Figure 3.1 depicts the various categories of medicinal plant-derived products commonly traded and their inter-relationship. Each of these groups has wide subsets of products and there is an overlap of categories with products belonging to either subset in many cases.