ENVIRONMENT-SRI LANKA: GEF Conservation Plan Leaks Ancient Remedies

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 30 1999 (IPS) - A project to safeguard Sri Lanka’s wealth of medicinal plants, jointly funded by the World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), threatens the well-kept secret of traditional remedies, warn environmentalists here.

“Our objection is to the collection of traditional knowledge without proper benefits to locals,” points out Hemantha Withanage, senior environmental scientist of the Environmental Foundation Ltd (EFL), a well-known local group.

The 5 million dollar project, ‘Conservation and Sustainable Use of Medicinal Plants’, was launched last August and will identify plants and encourage villagers to grow them in home nurseries if necessary.

Somewhat belatedly Sri Lanka created an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) committee in which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are members – partially allaying their fear that all ancient knowledge would be leaked through the project.

World Bank’s Sumith 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 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,” he 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 medicinal plants.

In Sri Lanka, a socio-economic survey would also 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 gathering an in-depth understanding of the role of medicinal plants and other forest products in community livelihoods, 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 data collection would first be sanctioned by the IPR committee, Withanage says some data was collected last year – before the committee was set-up.

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.

The conservation programme which will run over a five-year period has identified five forest sites – 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 forests for economic reasons.

“In Naula, for instance, valuable medicinal trees are cut for firewood while in other parts, there is encroachment in forest areas …,” says Cyril Pallegedera, project coordinator attached to the Ministry of Environment, which is handling the programme.

Indigenous doctors, called ayurvedic physicians, make use of the thousands of local medicinal plants to treat simple ailments such as fever, aches and pains, broken limbs and the more serious ones like heart disease, paralysis and skin diseases.

The art of collection and preparation of medicines can vary in the ayurveda system of medicine, but this knowledge has been zealously guarded and passed on from generation to generation

In one rural town, an indigenous doctor is treating heart patients at a fraction of the cost of surgery, which is at least 300,000 rupees (4,600 dollars) in hospitals here.

This lush, tropical island in the Indian Ocean has like other developing countries a wealth of plant species, sought after by pharmaceutical transnationals who patent it as original formulas to earn billions of dollars.

Though the export of medicinal plants or their extracts is banned, local entrepreneurs have found ingenious ways of smuggling the plants out of the country. At least 40 percent of western drugs contain Asian plant extracts.

Salacil Reticulata, the scientific term for a local tree named Kothalahimbutu, is well-known for diabetes control. Patients are advised to drink water left overnight in mugs and jugs made of its wood.

According to reports, last year a Japanese company patented a product based on this herb through the American Chemical Society.