Bulk African Trade is a limited liability company that is into the farming and processing of African traditional herbal plants into finished and semi finished products.
BAT, which stands for Bulk African Trade, also sells raw materials from these African medicinal trees all over the world. BAT is located in the tropical zone of Ghana, West Africa, in a small town called Akim Oda. BAT partners with Ghanaian villages to establish medicinal tree farms to ensure the longevity of their production and also the company's vision.
BAT has two branches: a 100% Ghanaian-owned company and an import/export company based in Germany. This facilitates our businesses in both regions and allows us to bring our items straight from the source to our customers without any other middlemen.
Our team is comprised of Ghanaian farm managers, medicinal plant specialists, and laboratory chemists.
The farms in Ghana are run by the local villages, creating work in rural areas with high unemployment and an opportunity for profit sharing.
The richness of the African tropics offers great healing and preventative natural medicines, which are becoming less used and forgotten as foreign synthetic medicines begin to flood the local markets. Our efforts are twofold: we encourage people to revalue these forgotten medicines in their communities, and we share these unique botanical
Iboga Tabetnanthe with the rest of the world.
The history of Tabernanthe Iboga in West Africa, Ghana, is also our story.Tabernanthe Iboga, as commonly known by many because of its active alkaloid ibogaine, helps reduce the withdrawal symptoms of opioids and hard drug addiction problems. Tabernanthe iboga originates from Central Africa, and the plant is found in the tropical forest. The awareness of its usefulness in the world of addiction at large motivated the owner of Bulk African Trade, Mr. Ralf Vogtel, to engage in the planting of this wonderful tabernanthe iboga plant on his farms in Ghana in 2017.
The farming of Tabernanthe iboga in Ghana was inspired by Ralf after his concern about the longevity of the plant and its usefulness. In 2017, he started engaging his company, which is already a farming company, to start nursing the seeds of the tabernanthe iboga plants. After a series of failures and the difficulty in getting the seeds of the iboga plant to germinate through the process of seed planting, the company got some few sprouts from the seeds planted. His enthusiasm continued till the company discovered a workable way of getting the seeds to germinate.
The most commonly used part of the Tabernanthe iboga plant is the root bark. Harvesting the root of every plant means killing the plant completely. This means that if the demand for the plant continues as it is now, there will be a time in the future when iboga will be short and there will be none to meet the ever increasing demand. This is to say that although it naturally grows in Central Africa, without proper sustainable farming engagement (afforestation), it might be limited in the future.
To prevent this unforeseeable shortage from happening, Bulk African Trade has already started planting tabernanthe iboga in West Africa, Ghana. Bulk African Trade is not only planting but also putting strategic measures in place to meet future demand and create a new supply chain aside from what is currently available in Central Africa (Cameron and Gabon).
