Category: Medicinal plants

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For once the obviously bemused deputy governor was talking sense

The line that I’ve used as the title of this post comes from an article in the Lagos Daily Independent which describes the recent torching, by the said deputy governor, of a crop of “Indian hemp” in Osogbo, the capital of Osun State, Nigeria. While setting her fire she…

…lamented that valuable acres of land in the state were being used to cultivate indian hemp instead of staple food crops.

Indian hemp? As in Apocynum cannabinum? Why set fire to Apocynum cannabinum? Especially after getting it to grow in Nigeria! Well, needless to say, I had the wrong end of the stick.

Anyway, what struck me about the article, apart from the delicious line which graces this post as its title, and the confusion that can be caused by the use of common names, is the following:

The peasant farmer should take centre stage. Revitalized commodity boards should be aligned with improved seeds and guaranteed farm gate prices to increase production. The effect will be a great increase in the living standard of all those involved in agriculture. There will clearly be no space for fallow farm lands to be used for growing indian hemp. Since she seems to be peeved, someone should educate Erelu Obada on the fine point of Indira Gandhi’s green revolution. The people of Osun State will clearly be better off for it.

I just can’t imagine commodity boards (however revitalized), seeds (however improved) and farm gate prices (however guaranteed) ever convincing “enterprising miscreants,” in the words of the author, in Nigeria or any other country, to give up their bhang fields. Just like I can’t imagine Yemeni farmers ever giving up their qat fields, despite similar interventions. Legalize it!

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Nibbles: CCD, Organic breeding, Bioprospecting

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Penis pepper finally reveals its identity

A weird, comma-shaped fruit is often to be seen “floating over the soldiers marching off to be sacrificed or flying priests” in the artwork of the Moche, an agricultural people that frequented the coastal plain of northern Peru from A.D. 100 to 800. That’s been recognized since the 1930’s, when archaeologists gave it the name ulluchu — meaning “penis pepper” because of its shape — but without actually been able to say what the fruit was. Modern-day Peruvians just don’t recognize it, and botanists need more to go on for a scientific identification.

They got it recently when the actual remains of a fruit were found during excavation of the the tombs of Dos Cabezas in the ancient Moche city of Sipan. Ethnobotanists Rainer Bussmann and Douglas Sharon had been asking around for ulluchu for years:

“We would go to these markets and people would say, ‘We think we know what that is, but it’s not being sold here,'” said Sharon, the retired director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkley. “Well, one of the reasons it wasn’t being used is because the Ulluchu seems to show up during sacrifices. And no one is being sacrificed anymore.”

But armed with the physical specimens, desiccated as they were, Bussman, who works at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, eventually homed in on the genus Guarea, which is in the mahogany family, not the pepper.

“Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist,” Sharon said. “He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it.”

Guarea seeds contain hallucinogenics and chemicals which raise blood pressure. Both would have been useful in sacrifices.

Bussmann, director of the garden’s William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, plans to further study the plant’s chemistry and suspects it might have applications as a blood pressure and erectile dysfunction treatment.

The sacrificial soldiers in Moche artwork over which ulluchu fruits float often appear to have erections. Expect huge plantations to spring up in the Peruvian lowlands.