Mountain Medicines

Herbalist Sabira Berdielieva stoops and pulls gently at the tough, low-growing plant at her feet. "You see this plant in my hand? It is good for treating headache and stomach-ache." For four decades, she has been carefully researching and recording the many uses of medicinal plants in the high valleys of the Tien Shan mountain range in Kyrgyzstan and is in no doubt about the modern potential for ancient remedies. "People always think that medicines come from rainforests but our mountains are a source of medicines too."

Credit: Susie Emmett

But to what extent can mountain medicines be a source of much-needed income to mountain farming communities? "Low-volume, high-value, non-perishable - there are a whole range of medicinal plants from the higher elevations that have huge potential," says Eklabya Sharma who heads the Mountain Farming Systems Division at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) based in Kathmandu Nepal. "If you go to the central Himalayan region of India - which is in fact a biosphere reserve - you find farmers have a sure market for picrorhiza and aconitum species." In Nepal, in the very remote region of Humla, farmers have managed to establish a facility to extract oils from particular plants thereby adding more value to what they can gather.

Particularly highly-prized plants, such as Picrorhiza kurrooa and Nardostachys grandiflora have been pushed to the brink of extinction by over-exploitation, according to Tinley Tshitila, a Research Officer in the Medicine and Aromatic Plants Section at the Yusipang National Agricultural Research Centre near Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan. "Demand, particularly from India, is so high that we banned exports, except in semi-processed form, so that we can try to control the trade and make sure our farmers benefit." Also, Bhutan has introduced a regime of sustainable harvesting from the wild. Using the traditional trading system, specialists worked with farmers to explain and encourage less-damaging collection. The most exploited area was Lingzhi, but now collection is permitted, in rotation, in other areas - Bumtang and Eastern Trashigang - too. But can wild plants supply the increasingly popular traditional Bhutanese, Ayurvedic or Chinese medicinal markets, let alone the new uses by modern conventional medicine?

Credit: Susie Emmett

It has long been believed that wild medicinal plants are more potent than those that are cultivated but research in Bhutan helped to prove the contrary can be true and opened up a whole new opportunity for impoverished mountain farmers. Under the auspices of Bhutan's Institute for Traditional Medicine, a European Union-supported trial of cultivated and wild medicinal plants began in the late 1990's. The results of comparing active principles in one plant, known locally as 'caramcabi', were a welcome surprise, remembers Tinley Tshitila. "Laboratory tests showed the cultivated plant had far more than the wild. All the literature at that time told us that a plant under more stress would be more potent than one that gets it's nutrients easily but our research showed this is not always the case for all mountain medicinal plants." Now, at altitudes exceeding 4400 metres, there are dozens of farmers growing medicines as well as their usual crops. "If you compare the returns from medicinal plants to other crops they can grow, it's three times higher, so farmers are more than happy to do it."

With cultivation proving possible, surely there is a risk that medicinal mountain plants could be grown lower down the slopes by farmers who already have many advantages over their higher counterparts? Eklabya Sharma at ICIMOD thinks not. "There are so many mountain medicinal plants that are there to be taken advantage of by mountain people. Mountain farmers are the ones who have the skills to do it." But he does have doubts as to whether they will retain the upper hand. "There are good examples, islands of success, but it needs co-operation between farmers and between the countries that share these rich resources. If there is not regional co-operation, they'll lose the market. It needs co-ordination."

For mountain medicines in many regions of the world there is a race against time: to identify effective remedies from mountain plants before the knowledge and, in some cases, the plants disappear. A recent survey of the Valley of Flowers National Park, in Garhwal, in the north of India found that of the 112 species of medicinal plants 23 species are rare and endangered and five species are enlisted in the Red Data Book of Indian plants. In western China, in Zhongdian county in Yunnan Province, the indigenous and largely sustainable use of mountain forests is giving way to commercial pressures. Two trees - Sinopodophyllum hexandrum and Diphylleia sinensis - were scientifically validated a decade ago as containing anti-cancer compounds and another, Fritillara cirrhosa is considered one of the best broad spectrum medicines for respiratory diseases but efforts to develop and demonstrate agroforestry in farmers' fields, in order to standardise and promote their cultivation and marketing, are slow.

Back in the high mountain valley, as the sun sinks lower, Sabira Berdielieva pulls her shawl close around her shoulders against the cold. "How good it would be if mountain medicines bring us riches now. But I don't know if it will happen." With her pockets full of leaves and seedheads, she turns and begins the long walk down to her home.