Quality Management

Quality Management
The raw material passes through different stages of processing, evaluation, and de-
velopment before the final product is released. In the farm sector, many abiotic
and biotic environmental factors will affect a crop’s composition and yield, result-
ing in variation of desired quality and yield, leading to a variation in the quality of
the product. Appropriate production and quality management measures, includ-
ing quality assurance, are required both at farms and in the herbal industrial sec-
tor. Cultivation not only ensures a consistent, generally predictable supply of plant
material without destroying our natural heritage in wild flora but also ensures the
selection of genetically superior plants with a high level of sustainable biomass and
an enhanced quality of the finished product [26, 73, 74].
The main source of raw materials for herbal medicines at present, however, is
wild plants. There is huge demand for raw plant material due to the widespread
and increasing use of herbal medicine. Continued harvesting is causing loss of ge-
netic diversity and habitat destruction. Therefore, domestic cultivation should be
encouraged. Domestic cultivation also offers the opportunity to overcome some of
the problems inherent in herbal medicine/extracts: misidentification, genetic and
phenotypic variability, extract variability and instability, toxic components, and
contaminants. Conventional plant breeding methods can improve both agronom-
ic and medicinal traits and molecular markers coupled with assisted selection will
be used increasingly in the future [75].