OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Tuesday
HARVESTING plants for medicines to treat anything from mad cow disease to malaria could help alleviate the poverty of African communities, a Commonwealth conference has been told.
“There is a demand for African herbs and plants to be used in medicines and our aim is to exploit that for development purposes to try to eradicate poverty,” Richard Gold from the Commonwealth Secretariat said at the start of the three-day gathering.
Gold said most of the African plants in demand in the developed world are harvested by women from impoverished communities.
“We are talking about small producers, about people on the margins of society and if we develop this properly we can make an impact on grassroots poverty.”
But, Gold said, African countries that produce medicinal plants faced a tough challenge in meeting the standards of the industry.
First they would have to meet international safety standards for their produce, and secondly they would have to document how the plant extracts were used to treat sickness and injury, because although such treatment is common in Africa, very little had been written about it.
Mazuru Gundidza from the University of Zimbabwe said African countries’ own reluctance to formalise the use of plants for medicinal purposes made it difficult to sell them to international companies.
“They ask whether we use it at home, and they want literature to prove it, then they want to know whether is registered by our authorities and ask for the registration number.
“Often this is difficult to comply with because there has been such resistance from our own regulatory bodies to acknowledge the use of herbal medicines.”
He said plants could be used to make cheaper medicines to treat malaria and to boost the immune system of Aids victims and treat some of the ailments they suffer, like ulcers.
Many African patients and doctors could not afford convential medicines and were using plants for Aids-related illnesses as they “had nothing else.”
There is also an increased demand for plants with anti-bacterial qualities to be used in medicines to treat animal diseases, including mad cow disease, as Western consumers had become more concerned about the chemicals in meat, he said. – AFP