Medicinal plants Profitable
plants can do magic. Medicine made from natural ingredients,
moreover, are affordable and have no side effects. not just
for the poor. Unfortunately, the quality of the available
plants is so bad, that often the healing powers are spoiled.
Due to pollution and unsuitable processing, the plants contain
pesticides, fungus, heavy metals and other toxic substances.
Local scientists, NGOs and governmental bodies agree that
quality must be improved considerably,
indigenous knowledge of the plants use and to assess the needs
of involved farmers, a workshop on medicinal plants took place
recently, organized by DEBTEC, Development of Biotechnology
and Environmental Conservation Centre.
dry tulsi leaves, take it as tea, sweeten it with honey and
it will cure your cough," resumes Nilufar Nahar, professor
of Chemistry at Dhaka University. "You find most of the
edible medical plants in our markets, amloki, bohera or haraloki.
But their quality is so bad, that I would not want to take
it as treatment."
chronic pain, a Nishinda-leaf-tea might help, as well as against
swelling, rheumatism, sores, fever and headache. The juice
of Amloki relieves fever and coughs. While the inner parts
of the Bohera fruit help against diarrhea, the Hortoki fruits
are effective for constipation, dysentery, jaundice, piles,
painful menstruation, astringent, fever, coughs, asthma and
their healing powers, medicinal plants might hide a huge economic
potential. In Bangladesh, 90% of all medicinal plants are
imported from India. DEBTEC likes to see these imports replaced
by high quality Bangladeshi plants.
expressed their worries about the economic success and their
demands of facilities on the DEPTEC workshop. "We now
cultivate medicinal plants, but we do not necessarily have
the knowledge of how to do it correctly. Further, we have
no certainty if we really can sell the plants," said
one farmer from Rajshani. "We need training, storage
facilities, taxonomy and quality standards and controls and,
above all, the people's awareness," a farmer from Chittagong
Hill Tracts resumed.
not just medicinal plants that lack quality. Other plants
too, fruit trees or timber trees for instance, remain of poor
quality, because most farmers have no access to quality samplings.
Therefore, profit remains low. To change that, a Swiss NGO
Intercooperation has assisted local nurseries to build up
their stocks, in Rajshani. Contacts between nurseries and
the farmers prospered and created a dynamic, market-orientated
fruit production in the past years.
contacts were set, Intercooperation started to link existing
governmental bodies to establish a nationwide supply of high
quality samplings and seeds.
these plants can be expensive, Intercooperation aims for a
dissemination of the seeds step by step: through nurseries
the high quality plants are to be multiplied. Thus the price
per plant is lowered and even the majority of poor farmers,
depending on their homestead, will have access to these plants,
samplings or seeds.
between the governmental bodies and universities started last
November. In a slowly ongoing process, MOUs have been established
between the NGO, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute
(BARI), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) with
its platform called National Agroforestry Working Group (NAWG),
Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and Angricultural
Informations Service (AIS).
(R) thedailystar.net 2004