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4th April 1999

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Will protection reveal hidden secrets?

By Feizal Samath

Sri Lanka's medicinal plants are the focus of a new conservation plan that worried environmentalists believe may expose the secrets and rituals of the country's herbal medicines to the world- since international funds are involved.

"Our objection is against the collection of traditional knowledge without proper benefits to locals," argues Hemantha Withanage, senior environmental scientist of the Environmental Foundation Ltd (EFL), a well-known local environmental agency.

The project is jointly funded by the World Bank and Global Environmental Facility (GEF).

Yet, rather than defend its position, the bank is working together with Sri Lankan environmentalists on the 'Conservation and Sustainable Use of Medicinal Plants' project in a bold move to co-opt non-governmental agencies in the bank's environment programme.

"Since the bank and the NGO movement are both keen on environmental projects that benefit the country and the community, we believe in working together," Sumith Pilapitiya, specialist on environmental affairs at the World Bank's Colombo office said.

The US $5.0 million conservation programme got underway in August last year and five locations with a high density of medicinal plants have been selected in Sri Lanka as conservation sites. The project will run over a five-year period.

The five forest sites are Bibile, Ritigalla, Rajawake and Naula in dry zone areas in the central region, and Kanneliya in the southern region, where poor villagers have exploited the forest plants for economic reasons.

The objective of the project is to identify thousands of medicinal plants, which are haphazardly cut or removed by villagers to make herbal medicines, and conserve these plants. Growing medicinal plants in home nurseries is also being encouraged. "In Naula, for instance, valuable medicinal trees are cut for firewood while in other parts, there is encroachment in forest areas. Trees are being cut or destroyed in the collection of bees honey, too by locals," says Cyril Pallegedera, project coordinator attached to the Ministry of Environment, the government agency handling the programme.

Thousands of local medicinal plants are used by ayurvedic physicians to treat simple ailments such as fever, aches and pains, broken limbs and the more serious ones like heart disease, paralysis, skin diseases, etc.

The art of collection and preparation of medicines can vary among doctors but this knowledge has been zealously guarded and passed on from generation to generation.

Sri Lanka has the biggest bio diversity in Asia and like many other Third World countries, is threatened with medicinal plants being sought after by the west. Though the export of medicinal plants or their extracts is banned, local entrepreneurs, helped by foreign firms, have found ingenious ways of smuggling the plants out of the country.

These plants are patented abroad as original formulas by multinational drug manufacturers and sold as herbal medicines worth billions of dollars around the world.

Recent western trends of using natural local remedies to cure a myriad illnesses has led to a growing interest by the health-conscious west in Asia's indigenous plants. Studies show that at least 40 percent of western pharmaceutical items contain Asian plant extracts.

Salacil Reticulata, the medicinal term for a local plant named Kothalahimbutu, is popular for diabetes control. Local physicians, who have created a cottage industry in the making of hand carved Kothalahimbutu wooden mugs and jugs, advise patients suffering from diabetes to drink water left overnight in a Kothalahimbutu mug.

Reports say that last year a Japanese company patented a product based on this herb through the American Chemical Society.

Fears expressed by environmentalists that traditional knowledge would slip out of the country under the new conservation plan, have been somewhat allayed by the creation of an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) committee in which NGOs' are members.

World Bank's Pilapitiya said that the committee, chaired by EFL Chairman Ravi Algama, was appointed in January this year and it would formulate IPR guidelines before data collection of the various species of medicinal plants gets underway.

"There is an understandable worry that because international agencies are involved in the project, the data would go out. To calm these fears, we began a dialogue with environmentalists and they suggested IPR guidelines to ensure that data collection was adequately monitored," Pilapitiya said.

Pilapitiya said this process has also helped in the setting of a general committee comprising of NGOs, government agencies and other stakeholders in the bank's other environment programmes.

"We believe environmental NGOs have a lot to offer in terms of knowledge and research," he said. The project is part of a global GEF programme to conserve nationally significant medicinal plants.

Under the local project, a socio-economic survey would be carried out to find out the dependence of villagers on the collection of medicinal plants. The survey would also recommend other ways of self-employment and income-generating activities.

An ethno-botanical survey, aimed at providing an in-depth understanding of roles in medicinal plants and other forest products in the livelihood of the communities, will also be undertaken. This survey is however a cause of concern to environmentalists.

"We don't know what kind of data they would collect in this survey and that is one of our worries," said EFL's Withanage. Though there have been assurances that no data collection will be undertaken without sanction of the IPR committee, Withanage says he believes some data was collected last year - before the committee was appointed.

EFL says that it is necessary for an IPR law for plant species, which Sri Lanka does not have at the moment, to be promulgated to regulate the collection of biological resources. "We are not opposed to the project because sometimes these medicinal plant resources can be wasted if not properly utilised by villagers. But we don't want a situation where valuable data - like the source of various herbal medicines and its preparation - goes abroad without our people benefiting," Withanage added.

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