Abstract

Hippophae spp. (sea buckthorn or SBT) is a highly nutritious, climate-resilient plant of the trans-Himalayan region with significant ecological and socio-economic value. While it provides livelihood in Ladakh, its potential in Uttarakhand is still underutilised. Hence, this study aims to identify and prioritise the key barriers to SBT commercialisation in Uttarakhand, highlights their causation and proposes actionable interventions for sustainable livelihood generation. This study is a narrative review with semi-quantitative prioritization approach which uses Relative Weighting Approach to identify and rank (based on severity scores; Si) the barriers to SBT commercialisation in Uttarakhand using literature from scientific databases, government reports, and institutional sources. This analysis identified market awareness gaps (28.2%; most severe barrier), supply-chain issues (18.4%), and infrastructure shortages (about 16%) as the most critical barriers. These barriers majorly occur due to limited farmer-training programs, weak market linkages, underdeveloped cold-chain infrastructure, limited access to natural SBT populations, etc. If interventions like frequent occurrence farmer-training programs, development of mobile processing units, enhanced institutional coordination, etc are applied correctly, potential of sustainable livelihood generation by SBT can be fully utilised in Uttarakhand.

Key words: Cultivation challenges, Sea buckthorn, Sustainable livelihood, Traditional knowledge, Uttarakhand Himalayas, Value added products