Harare — MAVIS MADANGURE, a 59-year-old farmer and herbalist based in Mhondoro, together with other women and men in her community, tirelessly work everyday in protecting and conserving existing medicinal plants and traditional medicine, simultaneously enhancing their sustainable use.

In attempting to achieve this, they have embarked on a livable utilisation of forests through a community-based programme.

Madangure and her colleagues, aware of the demands of the task at hand, realise that one hectare of forest when sustainably used for harvesting medicinal plants and traditional medicine, logging and fuel wood to a smaller extent, yields more income than clearing it for crop cultivation or animal husbandry.

Environmentalists note that it is indeed a slice of business worth going for, as long as the plants are not plucked wantonly and plundered.

Traditional healers and herbalists point out that most medicinal plants which can be harvested for their leaves, pods, seeds flowers, bark, without killing them can be harvested sustainably and in a measured way.

Animals may also be a source of medicines; insects, frogs and toads, spiders and snakes produce venom that may be curative or toxic depending on the dose and form in which preparations are administered.

However, Madangure and her colleagues are not into animal protection and conservation for medicinal purposes. But consciously or unconsciously, the community efforts and activities are directed towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set clear targets for improving livelihoods by 2015.

Away from Madangure and her colleagues, Zimbabwe is among 189 Heads of State and Governments, which agreed to the MDGs at the United Nations summit in 2000.

In an effort to bolster such agreements and perhaps bring in efforts and activities like Madangure and her team's to spotlight, in 2001 every African Head of State declared 2001-2010 as the Decade of Traditional Medicine in Africa.

This declaration stipulates that any action that makes the goal of health for all in Africa easier to achieve also helps to reduce poverty.

According to experts in biodiversity; medicinal plants and knowledge of their use are an integral part of the daily lives of people in developing countries.

Women like Madangure and her colleagues, especially, play a major role in the sustainable collection, vending and use of medicinal herbs in the home.

However, despite such commendable efforts, the loss of natural resources is a constant complaint of rural communities.

In view of such concerns, development critics have noted that for the past four to five years, governments, donors and civil society organisations have arguably not directed their work and activities towards achieving MDGs.

Goals such as eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, combating HIV and Aids, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development, have not been effectively linked to programme activities.

If such linkages have existed, it is because they have been minimal, and therefore insignificant. Some efforts by some local non-governmental organisations have been linked effectively with programmes and yet isolated collectively with similar government and civil society efforts.

In many ways, development scholars assert that governments, donors and civil society organisations should have been collectively providing local communities like Madangure's with the tools and materials as well as the training to manage these resource investments which could help restore these communities' resource bases.

According to a commissioned study by the World Bank on the multi-purpose herbal and traditional medicinal plants, this is especially true for their sustainable harvesting and cultivation which can help rehabilitate drylands, generate household income, provide affordable healthcare and help fulfil the demands of a rapidly, expanding global market for natural health products.

The World Bank again noted that local advantages can have greater multiple bio-economic benefits if the plants can be shown to have a global market comparative advantage.

These natural products, asserts the World Bank, have an estimated global market value of US$650 billion. At present, there is no information to indicate Africa's percentage of that market.

However, the bank observes that a market share of one percent (US$650 million) would be a major boon to Africa's dry-land poor, provided mechanisms could be put in place to ensure equitable sharing of such benefits.

Unknown to many people, experts note that multi-purpose herbal plants and traditional medicine, compare favourably with coffee, oil palm, cocoa and cotton as income generators and their value should no longer be ignored.

Furthermore, such plants do not appear to be affected by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development's market and trade market barriers that other commodities from developing countries face.

They could present a significant niche and trade opportunity that should be captured and optimised by developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Environmentalists say that the combination of important environmental uses and socio-economic values offers rural communities like Mhondoro an opportunity to effectively utilise their indigenous knowledge to become serious players in the global herbal plants and traditional medicine market.

The World Watch Institute also noted that traditional knowledge about medicinal plants is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves.

According to the World Conservation Union, this great surge of public interest in the use of plants as medicines has been based on the assumption that the plants would be available on a continuing basis.

However, no concerted effort has been made to ensure this, in the face of the threats posed by increasing demand, a vastly increasing human population and extensive destruction of plant-rich habitats such as the tropical forests, wetlands and parts of the arid zone.

Today, many medicinal plants face extinction or severe genetic loss. Protection and conservation efforts are not effectively collaborated and supported by governments, donors and civil society organisations.

There is very little of them in gene banks. Also too much emphasis has been put on the potential for discovering new wonder drugs and too little on the many problems involved in the use of traditional medicines by local populations.

For most countries, there is not even a complete inventory of medicinal plants.

Much of the knowledge on their use is held by traditional societies whose very existence is now threatened by modernity, development and giant Western pharmaceutical companies.

Little of this information on medicinal plants has been recorded in a systematic manner. The documentation of such information would help highlight the importance of medicinal plants and to sustain them for future community use and trade.

However, whatever herbal plants and traditional medicines remain in existence today, communities around the world face another stiff contention. How to prevent plants from being treated as intellectual property and being patented.

In 2002, at a United Nation's meeting on the Convention on Bio-diversity, guidelines were adopted that "promise to improve the way foreign companies and other users gain access to valuable genetic resources in return for sharing the benefits with the countries of origin and with local indigenous communities."

Since then, there is no agreement on intellectual property rights, or against over exploitation of medical plants.

It is around these property rights that the heat is on. Coalitions of NGOs and farmer organisations have since drawn up draft treaties to protect the world's gene pool, also known as Genetic Commons but have met with scant success.

While property rights may or may not be traded, genetic materials and plants can, and are.

Whether grown in the field, or plucked from forests like what Madangure and her colleagues do, dried, fresh in powder, processed into pills or dissolved in potions, experts note that botanical essences are used by various "schools of health care," from modern pharmacological science, to aromatherapy, homeopathy and traditional medicine.

Given such a leeway, further policy changes within the context of the particular MDGs should be encouraged through collective initiatives by governments, donors and civil society organisations.

These policy changes should complement what Madangure and her colleagues in Mhondoro are doing. Perhaps, the economies of scale should be tilted more broadly to encourage commercial development but on a sustainable basis.

Other than just sustainable protection and conservation, another wiser option is cultivation. Obviously, that requires investment and thus a security of income as well as the guarantee that such initiatives would have far-reaching benefits for the environment, human health and household incomes of communities like Madangure's.