Medicinal & Aromatic plants and Tissue Culture

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If it weren’t for the Foundation for the Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) and its latest avatar The Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine(I-AIM:  http://www.iaim.edu.in/)  whatever residual knowledge we had on medicinal and ayurvedic plants would have been lost forever. This means that data and prescriptions developed over thousand of years would have been lost and/or, pirated and then sold back to us. Below is an extract from http://www1.american.edu/ted/turmeric.htm.

“Turmeric is a tropical herb grown in East India, and the powdered product made from the rhizomes of its flowers has several popular uses worldwide. Turmeric powder, which has a distinctive deep yellow color and bitter taste, is used as a dye, a cooking ingredient, and a litmus in a chemical test, and has medicinal uses as well. In the mid-1990s, this product became the subject of a patent dispute with important ramifications for international trade law. A U.S. patent on turmeric was awarded to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1995, specifically for the “use of turmeric in wound healing.” This patent also granted them the exclusive right to sell and distribute turmeric. Two years later, a complaint was filed by India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, which challenged the novelty of the University’s “discovery,” and the U.S. patent office investigated the validity of this patent. In India, where turmeric has been used medicinally for thousands of years, concerns grew about the economically and socially damaging impact of this legal “biopiracy.” In 1997, the patent was revoked. But for two years the patent on turmeric had stood, although the process was non-novel and had in fact been traditionally practiced in India for thousands of years, as was eventually proven by ancient Sanskrit writings that documented turmeric’s extensive and varied use throughout India’s history. Many developing countries are concerned that the globalization of intellectual property rights under the WTO’s TRIPs agreement, and the negative consequences it has for traditional indigenous knowledge and biodiversity.”

This is just a simple example of what the West wants to with our indigenous knowledge.

India has had to fight to retain basmati rice, neem, sandalwood and many others as within an Indian traditional knowledge system. One solution being proposed is to “claim protection for indigenous products and processes as geographic indications (GIs). GIs are defined in the TRIPS agreement as “indications which identify a good as originating in the territory of a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation, or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographic origin.” ”

If you go to the Geographical Indications Registry at  http://www.ipindia.nic.in/girindia/ you will find over 150 products including foreign products registered there. I read recently that the humble lungi has also got registered.