Traditional plant medicines from India:
what we need to know
Project Fair Deal
Traditional plant medicines from India:
what we need to know
Project Fair Deal[1] 
Background and
Summary
The Bhumi Vardaan Foundation was launched in 2006 by HRH The Prince of Wales to support rural lifestyles and cultures in India. The Foundation will sustain itself and local communities and businesses by marketing high quality organic food and herbal products. In the latter case this will provide an attractive opportunity to invest in the production of medicines from ancient and very sophisticated traditions to meet modern needs and new personal care markets, while protecting the cultures, communities and habitats from which they have come.
There are challenges in developing safe and effective products based on Indian herbal medicines that will meet new international marketing criteria. Published information about the efficacy and safety of traditional medicines in the scientific literature is scanty. Collection of the plants can cause damage to their habitats. Quality of production is not usually assured. Therefore an important driver for a sustainable renaissance in Indian health traditions will be a more discerning interest from the international public and the healthcare professionals who advise them. For the sake of consumers, indigenous communities, and fragile ecosystems in India, international standards in the provision of healthcare products need to be met.
This project is focused on delivering a fair deal for traditional Indian cultures and livelihoods in a modern world. It sets out to pool expertise in India and internationally to deliver the following outcomes:
1) information on traditional Indian plant medicines that appropriately applies international standards of evidence and makes sense to healthcare practitioners and self-prescribers anywhere;
2) identification of the strongest therapeutic and cultivatable prospects for medicinal plant production;
3) the application and development of an appropriate certification system for sourcing that clearly track products to sustainable cultivation by approved organic growers and indigenous communities;
4) the best opportunities for investment to reward all parties involved.
The prospects for this work have been clarified in a major market report International market prospects for sustainably sourced medicinal and aromatic plants from India, commissioned by the Whitley Fund for Nature and available to download. It identifies regulatory and market constraints and proposes solutions in the European and USA markets.
Total funds of £360,000 are sought over a three-year period, to be administered by the Prince’s Bhumi Vardaan Foundation.
Supporters will be reassured by the progress already made and by the unique prospects for the long-term sustainability for this work. The funding will provide an unprecedented resource for ongoing work and growing financial security for growers and indigenous communities.
Details of the goals, intended outcomes and funding requirements follow.
Aim
Aim Project Fair Deal will bring specialist expertise and investment to the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation and other initiatives within India that record, represent and develop traditional plant-based medicines, and protect the communities and habitats that grow them.
Objectives
1) Information
a) In association with the Government of India’s National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) and with Pragya, and NGO in the Himalayas, to build a team of academics in India.
b)
To induct and supervise members of the academic team in collating available information on the botanical description, the ethnobotany, traditional use, and clinical and laboratory studies of traditional medicinal plants and on the pharmacology of their constituents.
c) To input all the materials into a dedicated relational database that links published information by taxonomic, phytochemical and therapeutic categories.
d) To distil from the database the best available evidence on the benefits and risks of taking traditional Indian herbal medicines for physicians and other health professionals and also for anyone choosing to self-medicate, and to place this information onto freely accessible web pages.
e) To identify and refer to an international peer-review group.
f) To develop web-based educational programmes in collaboration with international medical and other institutions.
2) Prospects
a) To combine the above with intelligence from Pragya and other authorities towards the identification of a range of herbal products that are both realistically able to be cultivated to contract and most likely meet international standards of evidence and quality.
b) Specifically to design for the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation a “Himalayan premium medicine” range based on an evidence-based assessment of leading traditional plants, combined and formulated along traditional lines to create new Intellectual Property.
3) Sourcing and certification
a) To support Pragya and other agencies in recording indigenous oral traditions of medicine and sustaining traditional habitats and livelihoods
b) To support Bhumi Vardaan, Pragya and other bodies involved in the organic cultivation of traditional medicines so as to sustain rural communities, habitats and threatened plant species.
c) To facilitate the adoption of a certification system that makes clear to consumers that products concerned are sourced directly from approved organic growers
4) Investment opportunities
a) To identify partners able to manufacture future product ranges at pharmaceutical standards for national and international markets.
b) To identify most suitable market outlets, within India, in markets with significant Indian populations (eg in southeast Asia, eastern and southern Africa) in UK /Europe and the USA.
c) To prepare business plans for new production and marketing.
Challenges
There are a number of obstacles in the way of ensuring that the traditions of Indian medicine are not lost.
o Current demand for traditional Indian medicines is unregulated and non-discerning: it leads to exploitation, unsustainable collection practices with loss of habitat, damage to community livelihoods, and threats to individual plant species. Sadly and ironically this will alienate the same international market that might otherwise be sympathetic to Indian traditional medicine.
o Quality standards often fail international expectations and there are no reliable national schemes to correct this; the use of heavy metals in some formulations has caused adverse effects and is not tenable in international markets.
o Indigenous knowledge systems are threatened by modern economic and social pressures, with too little income from local resources filtering back to the communities concerned.
o There is often a heightened awareness of intellectual property rights around product formulations at local and commercial levels (“if I give away my secret my medicine loses its power”) that can impede transparency.
o Current initiatives to record traditional medicines in India are not wholly coherent and do not address international standards for an evidence base in medicine.
o A poor publication record in scientific journals reinforces the sceptic’s view that these medicines do not merit serious study.
Much of Indian traditional medicine is provided in the context of broad holistic systems, Ayurveda and Unani-Tibb, reflecting respectively Hindu and Islamic traditions, plus Tibetan medicine in the north. In these systems the use of medicines is seen as only part of a much broader approach to health care. Particularly in Ayurveda (“the science of life”) there is a view that divorcing the medicines from wider health measures (breathing, eating, body work, right action) is to devalue them. Also in both “codified” systems medicines are mostly provided in complex formulations and there is less weight given to the properties of individual plants.
Solutions
Project Fair Deal will bring unique expertise and technology transfer to ensure that the Prince’s Bhumi Vardaan Foundation can deliver the quality in traditional medicinal products that its status demands. The project will address the issues as follows.
o Market: stimulate demand for quality traditional Indian medicinal products in niche outlets where premium quality is likely to be appreciated (in Europe these will need to be practitioner-led supplies).
o Sustainability: bring long term solutions to the sourcing of medicines so that indigenous cultures are protected, livelihoods ensured and habitats maintained.
o Evidence: make better sense of the fragmented information available.
o Technology transfer: develop skills in India in the development and presentation of traditional medicines for the modern world.
o Intellectual Property: generate new products and IP for the Foundation to support income generation and long term financial security for all involved.
This project will evaluate the use of medicinal plants from the widest range of evidence. The literature on Ayurveda, Unani-Tibb or Tibetan approaches will provide leads rather than confirmatory evidence. Whereas any formulations developed will be sympathetic to these traditions they will be based on wholly new reviews of benefits and risks.
International Advisory Group
It will be important to assure the quality of information published on the web on the safe and effective use of traditional Indian medicines. Project Fair Deal will involve an international team of experts to review final drafts.
Intellectual Property
Propriety rights to the use of herbal formulations are strongly defended in India and there is also a default view that traditional information is not for exploitation, even by charitable corporations. The recent major investment by the Government of India in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library was as a response to the prospect of biopiracy. In this project new Intellectual Property will be generated in the form of evidence-based formulations, prepared in accordance with traditional approaches to health care.
Progression and sustainability
At the end of the project it is expected that growers and their communities will be closer to a sustainable future meeting a new and more discriminating national and international market demand through Bhumi Vardaan and other enterprises. The academic team are likely to find ongoing work in related projects with Plant Medicine CIC.
Risks and opportunities
SWOT analysis
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Strengths
o Unique and established international expertise. o Reputation and status of HRH-linked products. o Involvement of Government of India research institute. o Major market report completed.
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Weaknesses
o Unregulated international and Indian market for medicinal plants. o Little relevant academic capacity in India o Intellectual property issues in Indian traditional medicine. o Little market discrimination for quality herbal products.
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Opportunities
o Improved reputation of traditional Indian medicines. o Sustainable cultivation of source materials with benefits accruing to rural and remote communities. o Development of new fairtrade-like kitemark for cultivated medicines in India o New resources for improving family health and professional health care. o Mutually valuable investment opportunities. o A robust income stream for the work of the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation in India
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Threats
o Abuse of habitat and indigenous culture in collection of medicinal plants in India. o Stimulation of demand risks encouraging poaching and habitat destruction. o Climate change and other loss of habitat and traditional livelihoods.
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