Category: Medicinal plants

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Indian government to invest in herbs

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.

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News from the front: Belize

As far as I know, it has more species of trees, shrubs, bushes, herbs, and grasses than any domestic garden on Earth: 318 species of flowering plants, 250 of which are native to Belize. That’s about 15 percent of the indigenous floristic diversity of the whole country, more species of native plants than live in the forest that surrounds it. Every plant is here for a purpose, used as medicine, food, thatch, fiber, because it attracts butterflies, birds, and mammals, or just because of its beauty.

The garden is Masewal, in western Belize, and the words are from an article in Orion magazine that describes this astonishing place. The vision of one man, who sought to reclaim some of his Mayan heritage and has been doing so for 31 years, using the garden as store-house, teaching aid and demonstration plot. Fascinating.

Belize was my first experience of a tropical forest and I remember the giddiness of it. I wrote something about it back then; I wonder whether I can dig it out.

via Metafilter.

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It’s good for you, mate

I’ve tasted mate tea, made from the herb Ilex paraguariensis, and I have to say it is a mystery to me how so many Argentinians (and others) could be totally hooked on the stuff. Maybe because they knew all along it was so good for them. ((A comprehensive review was published in the Journal of food Science.)) Now science agrees. Elvira de Majia, of the University of Illinois, discovered that mate drinkers in her lab had greater activity in an enzyme that increases HDL (good) cholesterol while lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol. On that basis, and mate’s many other health benefits, she secured a deal with Argentina to study in detail 84 different varieties of mate, including wild populations. According to the press release:

“Our studies show that some of the most important antioxidant enzymes in the body are induced by this herbal tea,” said de Mejia of her study in September’s Planta Medica. ((Which is here, but you need to be a subscriber.))

“Because Argentina has the different mate varieties, we’ll be able to do more comparisons and characterizations between the different genotypes and the benefits of different growing conditions—whether in sun (on a plantation) or in shade (under the rainforest canopy),” she added.

There’s also interest in adding the active ingredient(s) to processed food. There always is.