Network BlitzI wonder whether Buhu would work with Ibogaine to ease the side
effects.
Anna


Poachers plunder South Africa's floral treasures
Monday, September 4, 2000
By Jeremy Lovell

An obscure plant credited with curing almost anything from hangovers to
boils is in danger of extinction because of soaring demand from Europe and
the United States and lack of effective protection at home.
The demand for oil and leaves from the round leafed buchu plant, Agathosma
Butulina, known for its medicinal properties since the time of the native
Khoi bushmen, has inflated prices and prompted a surge in illegal or
ill-managed cropping.
"It is going to destroy the plant either through over harvesting or
hybridization," Cobus Coetzee, a scientist at the South African Agricultural
Research Council, told Reuters. He said its fate was inextricably linked to
the general plundering of the Western Cape's rich floral heritage.
Cape Nature Conservation officer Mossie Basson said poachers could collect
up to 220 pounds of buchu plant material in a day for which they would be
paid up to $288.
"The trouble is the poachers work mostly at night and very hurriedly.
Instead of cutting the plant and letting it re-grow, they uproot it and kill
it," he said.
Extracts from the plant, a member of the citrus family, have been used for
centuries by the bushmen to cure blood and intestinal disorders as well as
help heal wounds from battle. There are even indications it might help
racehorses run faster.
Early Dutch and British colonists noted its miraculous properties and
adapted it to their own use, steeping it in brandy and vinegar for internal
and external use. Bales of buchu leaves were even listed on the cargo
manifest of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage across the Atlantic.
"It is a stimulant, useful for hangovers ... colds, flu, coughs, rheumatism
and gout," according to Ben-Erik van Wyk and Nigel Gericke in their book
"People's Plants."
But that is by no means the only source of demand for the shrub that
originates in the Cape's arid mountains. The rich industrialized world's
focus on processed foods has been a major source of rising demand for buchu
oil, used as a flavor enhancer like salt without the negative effects of
sodium chloride.
HIGH PRICES CAUSE POACHING
Botanist Earle Graven, who founded his Grass Roots company a decade ago to
process raw plant material, said it took a ton of buchu leaves and stalks on
average to produce two pounds of oil. "Buchu goes in cycles. It has become
expensive at the moment. The market is worth about 10 to 12 million rand a
year."
High prices have led to a surge in poaching of the protected plant, which
thrives on almost inaccessible south-facing mountain slopes in the Cape, and
encouraged cultivation, which Coetzee said had led to planting of the
perennial plants outside their usual territory and caused hybridization.
"We have to maintain pure genetic material for the future," he said.
"Hybridization has already occurred and hybrids are infertile."
Rediscovery of herbal remedies by the pharmaceutical industry has further
fueled demand for buchu along with a whole range of other medicinal plants
including devil's claw, which is used to treat arthritis. Coetzee estimated
world trade in plant-based pharmaceuticals is worth about $120 billion a
year.
U.S. food and pharmaceutical firms, aware of the threat to wild plants from
over-exploitation, insist on buying only cultivated material. Coetzee said
this was praiseworthy but unfortunately it exacerbated the complication of
hybridization.
The problem is further fueled by a belief among some of South Africa's
foremost herbalists — the Rastafarians — that cultivated material has lost
its medicinal efficacy. They refuse to use farmed material.
But for Basson and Coetzee, the fate of buchu is, while lamentable, simply
an indicator of the wholesale destruction of South Africa's rich treasure
house of plants.
COLONIAL PLUNDERERS STRIPPED SOUTH AFRICA
"A study in 1975 showed that 60 percent of the Cape floral kingdom had been
destroyed in the previous 150 years," Basson said. "I calculate we have less
than one third left and the pressures on it are extreme. It happened in
Mexico and it is happening here. We are the last outpost."
For Coetzee, the issue goes back to colonial times when the incoming
plunderers operated in the absolute belief that they owned what they saw and
could do with it as they wished. This proprietorial attitude applied as much
to the indigenous people as to the local flora and fauna, he said.
"This was the case up to the Rio Convention in 1992, which gave recognition
for the first time to the principle that a country owned its own species,"
he said.
Coetzee noted that many of the Cape's exclusive plant species such as the
coveted protea — South Africa's national flower — were now being widely
grown outside the country in the Netherlands, Israel and Hawaii.
"A general statement can be made that the Netherlands earns more from South
African flowers than South Africa earns from its gold," he said. "South
Africa has already lost control of many of its flower species and other
people are making the money we should be from them. Unless we do something
to protect it the same will happen to the plant genetic material."
He said there were 13,000 plant species indigenous to South Africa. Many are
unique and all need protection.
More than 3,000 people work in the country's flower industry and the same
number in the medicinal plant business, with exports of indigenous flowers
alone worth some $15 million a year, he said.
"You could employ double the number of people and multiply by 10 the income
if we could develop the indigenous crop effectively. We have already lost
the battle on floriculture. Unless we get our act together now, the same
will happen to our medicinal plants." ($1-6.96 Rand)
Copyright 2000, Reuters
All Rights Reserved
"The willing, Destiny guides them; the unwilling, Destiny drags them."
- Seneca the Younger (c.4B.C. - A.D. 65).



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