Investigating the Barriers of local communities in marketing of medicinal plants (Case study: Tilabad carbon sequestration project, Golestan province)

The present study aims to investigate the Barriers of local communities in marketing the production of medicinal plants in the carbon sequestration project of Tilabad watershed in Golestan province. The statistical population of the study was 100 producers of medicinal plant products that were selected by census.The questionnaire as a research tool that to identify the barriers facing the producers of medicinal plants during interviews with relevant experts, facilitators and local communities based on the snowball method, based on which 31 barriers were identified. The validity of the questionnaire was determined using the opinions of experts and its reliability was determined by calculating the Cronbach's alpha coefficient with an average of 0.799. In order to analyze the collected data, SPSS25 software was used. In the descriptive part of descriptive statistics such as frequency, frequency percentage and average, and in the inferential part, from exploratory factor analysis to classify barriers and from the one-sample t-test to achieve the most important barriers to marketing of pharmaceutical products, and from my test. Whitney was used to compare the average marketing barriers in different groups. The results showed that "lack of access to appropriate infrastructure and communication methods" and "lack of participation and benefit from experience" were the highest and lowest barriers for medicinal plant growers, respectively. The results of the Mann-Whitney test also showed that people who were members of cooperatives and rural organizations and had a history of growing medicinal plants faced fewer challenges in marketing their products than other producers