wfn.org | All Africa News Service Bulletin 35-02 (c)

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

AANA Bulletin is an ecumenical initiative to highlight all endeavours and 
experiences of Christians and the people of Africa.  AANA Bulletin is 
published weekly and, together with the French Edition - Bulletin APTA - is 
also available through e-mail.	For editorial and subscription details, 
please contact: 

AANA Bulletin						Bulletin APTA
Acting Editor - Mitch Odero				Acting Editor -
Silvie Alemba

Growing Use of Herbal Medicine Threatens Plant Life

It is now officially recognised by the World Health Organisation, that 80 
percent of the people in poor economies rely on traditional medicine for 
their primary health care. In many countries, the ratio of orthodox 
medicine practitioners to the population is still very high. A recent 
research finding show that resurgent enthusiasm for traditional medicine is 
leading to over-harvesting of plants from the wild for medicinal use.

By Henry Neondo

F
or example in Ghana and Zambia, the ratio of orthodox medicine 
practitioners to the population is 1:2000 as compared to 1:200 of 
traditional medicine.

However, a recent WorldWide Fund for nature's research finding show that 
resurgent enthusiasm for traditional medicine is leading to over-harvesting 
of plants from the wild for medicinal use.

The WWF report says this is not only challenging conservation efforts but 
is also threatening biological diversity. In Kenya's Kilifi district, a 
research by Prof  Peter Odhiambo of the University of Nairobi reveals that 
there is one government doctor for a population of 50,000.

This, he says, means that it is the traditional medicineman that takes care 
of the health of more rural people and not the conventional doctors.

The scenario has a number of African governments awakening to the potential 
the African traditional medicine has in combating the health malaise 
ravaging their populace and as a result, many of these are at differing 
levels of regularising it within their national health policies.

This raises a hidden problem that A.C. Hamilton of the WWF London office 
and the lead researcher in the report says need urgent measures. "That 
there are many noted factors that show problem of plants being 
over-harvested from the wild populations".

The problem, he adds, is compounded by an increasing number of large-scale 
international trade in medicinal plants, used both for herbal medicine and 
for the manufacture of pharmaceutical drug.

The WWF report says that the manner of plant harvesting in traditional 
communities require new solutions that need to be used to design and 
implement new methods of managing wild populations, or transferring the 
business to reliance on cultivated plants.

He said that there is also growing interest in obtaining samples of plant 
material, or traditional knowledge about plant uses, to explore for new 
commercial medical products. But the sad thing, he said, is that the scale 
of international trade in medicinal plants is difficult to assess because 
of a paucity of reliable statistics and trade secrecy.

However, Rose Akoth, a tradtional healer in Nairobi's Kibera area disputes 
this, saying that like her, most traditional healers only harvest what they 
need per time reserving others for future use. "We only take out mature 
portions of the plants we want and leave
out the young for sustainability", she says.

According to the Environmental Liason Centre International Office for 
Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya, "conservation issues in international trade 
in medicinal plants for existing products mainly concern those plants that 
are harvested from the 'wild', which is the case for the great majority of 
species.

Conservation issues arise if the trade threatens conservation of biological 
diversity or is not sustainable. Biological diversity may be threatened if 
the trade endangers survival of the species, erodes its genetic diversity 
or causes loss or degradation of important natural or semi-natural 
ecosystems".

A cross section of traditional healers in Africa, however, say they are in 
a practise handed down to them by their grand parents who inculcated to 
them the need to conserve and sustain the pool of traditional medicine 
resources, thus do not feel that they threaten biological diversity.

While this maybe so in their locality, internationally however, a study by 
Farnsworth, N.R & Soejarto, D.D in 1991 showed that as many as 
35,000-70,000 species of plants have been used at one time or another for 
medicinal purposes.

By far the greater number of species is employed in herbal medicine and is 
used in unrefined or semi-processed form, often in mixtures, which 
sometimes also contain non-botanical ingredients.

Traditions of herbal medicine use is not confined to Africa alone as there 
are also strong traditions of herbal medicine in parts of Europe, such as 
Germany, France and Eastern Europe. According to WWF, the herbal sector is 
growing fast, increasing by 12-15 percent by value per year in the UK, US 
and Italy.

According to a review of a recent consultancy report by McAlpine Thorpe and 
Warrier, there are more than 2,000 herbal medical companies in Europe and 
more than 220 in the USA.

This review states that Germany is the largest market in the world for 
herbal medicines, with annual sales of US $1.2 billion representing nearly 
25 percent of the national pharmaceutical market. The US is the next 
largest market with sales of US $480 million.

It is difficult to obtain precise information about the structure and scale 
of the international trade in medicinal plants.

Anna Lewington, who recently carried out a short-term study on behalf of 
WWF of the importation of medicinal plants into Europe and attendant 
conservation problems, found trade statistics and customs records to be 
very inadequate, and the industry as a whole not particularly forthcoming 
about its activities.

This report states that eight countries then belonging to the EU imported 
80,738 tons of 'vegetation plant materials used in pharmacy' in 1980, the 
biggest importer being Germany with 31,452 tons, followed by France.

Quantities will certainly be larger now, as it is widely acknowledged that 
the trade has grown. Lewington estimates that 500, and possibly as many as 
600, species of medicinal plants are traded through Hamburg, Germany, which 
lies at the heart of the import business in Europe.

A good example is conservation issues associated with international trade 
in Prunus africana for medicinal products. Prunus africana is a large and 
widely distributed tree of wet montane forests in Africa. Extracts of the 
bark, marketed as Tadenon (France) and Pigenil (Italy), are used in several 
European countries to treat early stages of benign prostatic hypertrophy.

Prunus africana is, in fact, a widely used medicinal plants in many parts 
of Africa. Presently, bark, or extracts from the bark, are exported to 
Europe in significant quantities from Cameroon, Zaire (Kivu), Kenya and 
Madagascar.

So far as can be determined, all harvesting is from uncultivated "wild" 
trees growing in forests. It is difficult to establish the scale of the 
trade, but WWF information indicates that the total harvest of wet bark 
each year might be in the order of 1,600-2,000 tonnes.

  Poverty Responsible For Alarming School Dropouts

With pupils limping to school on empty stomachs and dressed in tatters, 
Malawi may not realise her ambition to increase the number of citizens who 
are able to read and write. Experts have always pointed at poverty as the 
main reason for escalating rate of school drop outs. Many of the children 
are absorbed in the child labour market to help their poor families earn 
additional incomes finance basic requirements.

By Hobbs Gama

T
he situation is a desperate reality of poverty.  There are many pupils 
going to school on empty stomachs and dressed in tatters. Considering such 
widespread helplessness, the future may not be bright for Malawi's literacy 
programmes.

The admnistration of President Bakili Muluzi launched the donor funded free 
primary school education programme but hunger and poverty are frustrating 
the war against illiteracy.

The southern African country which is one of the hardest hunger hit in the 
region alongside Zambia, Mozambique and Swaziland, has up to 70 percent of 
its population suffering acute hunger due to poor harvest the past few years.

Malawi, which is importing maize from neighbouring countries, has a 600,000 
metric tonnes food shortfall at a time when aid agencies estimate that 65 
percent of the 12 million population live below the poverty line. Life 
expectancy has since dropped to 43 years.

Out of a total 1.2 million pupils who registered for grade one at the onset 
of the free primary education, only 300,000 have made it to grade eight, 
the last class at primary (elementary) school while the rest have dropped
out.

This was the sad revelation made recently by the Ministry of Education to 
UNICEF executive director, Carol Bellamy who visited Malawi.

The director for basic education in the Ministry of Education, Joseph 
Matola told the global child welfare body that government attributed the 
alarming dropout rate to, to among other things, lack of classrooms, desks, 
poor quality of teachers, the HIV/AIDS scourge and the onset of the hunger 
crisis.

"Most of the children come to school without food, they have no clothes and 
most of them have ended up selling commodities on the streets and some may 
even have commercial sex workers," complained Matola.

He said this at Ndirande township, in the highly-populated country's 
commercial city of Blantyre. Ndirande Hill Primary School has only 20 
classrooms while a 100 classes take place in the open. The school has 2,600 
orphans.

Bellamy, while assuring her organisation's support in such areas as 
providing of learning materials, maintenance of school structures and 
teacher training, said UNICEF is already undertaking supplementary and 
therapeutic feeding for the most under nourished children. The initiatives 
seeks to keep children in school.

"It would be a shame for Malawi to fall back in terms of the work already 
done where more children were going to school. We think if you lose a 
generation from school you won't have the kind of future leaders you need 
in the country," said Bellamy.

Experts have always pointed at poverty as the main reason for escalating 
rate of drop outs. Many of the children are forced into child labour to 
help their poor families earn supplementary incomes for food.

Orphans, children from women-headed homes and destitutes fall easy pray to 
child labour. The government of Malawi has since embarked moves to enact 
favourable legislation to eliminate the exploitation of children in homes, 
tea and tobacco estates and all other work places.

Tobacco growing countries are up in arms to fight the lobby which they deem 
threatens the future of their tobacco dependent economies. As for Malawi, 
75 percent of foreign exchange earnings come from tobacco exports.  Lately, 
there have been mounting collaboration to check the evil which retards 
children's development.

There are, of course, additional efforts. Four tobacco exporting companies 
in the country - African Leaf, Limbe Leaf, Dimon and Stancom Tobacco - have 
teamed up to eliminate child labour in the tobacco growing districts 
through a programme called Tobacco Exporters Children Service TECS 
introduced last July.

Funded by the Geneva-based organisation, the Elimination of Child Labour in 
Tobacco ECLT, the project will run for four years covering 60 villages in 
two target districts of Kasungu and Dowa, central Malawi. A survey by the 
four organisations revealed the problem of child exploitation was serious 
in the districts.

TECS project manager Limbani Kakhome says they intend to combat child 
labour through four interventions - the provision of quality education, 
food security, safe water and health to children.

The four components are to be implemented by four non-governmental 
organisations. Creative Centre for Community Mobilisation (Crecom) will be 
responsible for education, Livingstonia and Nkhoma Synods of the Church of 
Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP) church will carry out the safe water 
component while Total Care will take care of food security.

"Once children have adequate food, travel short distances to school, have 
access to safe water source and hospital, child labour will be combated," 
enthused Kakhome adding that a recent survey carried by organisations 
involved showed that child labour was mainly caused directly or indirectly 
by by the four components covered in the project.

Child labour is rampant because most children drop out of school due to 
shortage of food, because they are assigned to draw water from distant 
sources or because of inadequate health facilities.

Western countries, especially the Nordic region, have been lobbying their 
governments to ban Malawi's tobacco exports to Western markets unless the 
problem of child labour was tackled.

This stand was supported by the International Labour Organisation ILO to 
impose sanctions on products of countries that exploit child labour to 
produce them.

There is more action. The World Health Organisation WHO is also pushing for 
a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control FCTC which seeks to ban tobacco 
growing and advertising.

Tobacco growing countries are up in arms to fight the lobby which they deem 
threatens the future of their tobacco dependent economies. As for Malawi, 
75 percent of foreign exchange earnings come  from tobacco exports.

Lately, there have been mounting collaboration to check the evil which 
retards children's development. Observers say although it is a tough 
undertaking, Africa and the developing world is reminded, despite 
widespread poverty to consider the future of the defenceless children.