The Government of India is apparently about to invest Rs 1,000 crore (which i think is Rs 10,000,000,000, something in excess of US$ 250 million, if I’ve got my decimal points right) in herbal medicines over the next five years. The article notes that:
It is a great irony in a country where households pass herbal remedies from one generation to another, and one village to the next, that India accounts for just about 2% of the global herbal drugs market, which is valued at about $63 billion (about Rs2.5 billion). More than 8,000 indigenous medicinal plant species can be found here, but just about 1,000 are commonly traded.
But there’s more. The scheme suggests that collecting medicinal plants will earn poor people more money than cultivating food. Will it earn them enough to buy the food they would have grown? There are plans to train people how best to harvest plants sustainably, and the article talks about a genebank, which sounds more like a database to me.
I have my doubts about the wisdom of massively centralised schemes such as this one, especially when, according to the article, the plan is to convert crop-lands to medicinal plants. Does India really have so much food available that it can afford to divert land from edible crops to medicinal plants, no matter how valuable those plants are? One cannot eat money, or medicinal plants.