Category: Medicinal plants

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Sweetleaf hits India

I’m always somewhat ambivalent about the kind of story I saw today on Kangla Online about how some farmers in Senaputi district in north-eastern India are taking up the cultivation of Stevia. This is a South American herb in the Asteraceae which is widely cultivated around the world as the source of an alternative to artificial sweeteners.

On the one hand, it is always good to see farmers diversifying and experimenting, including with exotic crops. On the other, you wonder whether there isn’t a local – and locally used – species that might have been promoted and commercialized in this way. And will the money farmers raise from Stevia be sufficient to buy them and their families the nutritious food they will no longer be growing on their land?

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African medicinal plants

Two stories appeared today on medicinal plants in South Africa. AllAfrica has an article on the launch of the Medicinal Plant Incubator Project (MPIP) at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in Roodeplaat, although actually I found the keynote address delivered at the opening ceremony much more interesting. What will MPIP do? According to another article:

Gauteng’s traditional healers are to be taught new methods to cultivate plants and harvest them from the wild, in an attempt to ensure that the local medicine chest remains full for future generations.

Meanwhile, EurekAlert describes how “a team of researchers has now examined the effectiveness of 16 plants growing in the country’s Kwa-Zulu Natal region and concluded that eight plant extracts may hold value for treating high blood pressure (hypertension).”

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Chinese fungi and tea

I’m killing a few hours at Hong Kong International Airport, so I pick up the latest issue of China Today. There’s a number of really interesting articles, but two little snippets jumped out at me. The first is a short note on the Chinese Caterpillar Fungus, Cordyceps sinensis. No, I’d never heard of it either, but it turns out that it is important in Chinese traditional medicine, and that it has not been possible to grow it in the lab. Until just now that is, hence the note in the Sci-tech Info section announcing the possibility of mass-production.

The other really nifty piece of sino-information occurs in the opening section of an Around China piece on the Zhenyuan Yi-Hani-Lanu Autonomous County. It seems that this ancient tea-growing area, with its tea-dominated forests, boasts what is considered the oldest and largest tea plant in the world. At 25 metres tall, almost 3 metres in diameter and an alleged 2,700 years of age, it is apparently quite the tourist attraction, and “its fleshy, glossy leaves produce a strong and lasting flavour.”