Bogota, Colombia – Whenever her son’s arthritis becomes unbearable, Mery Aguilar heads to a stall in the Seventh of August farmers market, where she buys a big bag of flowers.
Then she boils the petals and buds of the borrachero and ruda plants, which grow wild in the Andes, and adds the brew to a hot bath that is her son’s only salvation from debilitating pain.
“Sometimes,” Aguilar said, “grandmothers’ secrets are better than the doctors.”‘
The treatment for Aguilar’s 29-year-old son was just one of dozens “prescribed” by Pilar Hernandez in her stall at the market on a recent overcast day. All involved plants from Colombia’s rich array of natural flora, among the most diverse in the world.
Not long ago, such cures would have been laughed off as witchcraft or old wives’ tales by the government and the medical establishment.
But now Colombian officials, long wary of foreign “bio-prospecting” of the country’s rich natural resources, are starting to take claims of herbal powers seriously.
New efforts are underway to catalog and test the medicinal plants, which may number 2,000 or more, that are bought every day by people such as Aguilar.
And the door that has been long closed to foreign drug companies has been opened, even if just a crack.
Officials say the government’s heightened interest in commercializing traditional remedies is based on the hope that they might provide a source of economic growth, improved medical treatment and alternative crops for poor farmers who now grow illegal coca leaves or opium poppies.
The U.S. government and the United Nations have underwritten biodiversity-based drug projects in developing countries. In doing so, they have tried to play down fears of bio-piracy with promises to return some share of whatever profits result to biodiversity stewards, the poor or indigenous people who have preserved the plants.
Although drug developers always have stolen from nature – aspirin, for example, was first isolated from the bark of an Amazonian tree – the pace has quickened in recent years with improved analyses of natural substances and the slowing of synthetic drug development.
The mainstreaming of nature-based remedies by domestic companies has lagged because of the lack of research funds and the reluctance of the medical establishment to switch from the synthetic pills and precise dosages its members are accustomed to prescribing, said Yann-Olivier Hay, a French biochemist who directs the Farmaverde project.
“One of our biggest jobs is to make doctors less skeptical, that medicinal plants are tools, not witchcraft,” Hay said.
