Cashing in on medicinal plants

Medicinal plants that play an important role in primary health care abound in the country. However, medicinal plants do not only provide effective and low cost health remedies. Nowadays, planting these crops can be a sure money-making business for Filipino farmers and entrepreneurs.

The demand for quality raw materials of herbal medicine has gone up since the Department of Health (DOH) through the Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care (PITACH) began distributing herbal medicine at the National Food Authority (NFA) rolling stores. Lagundi, for cough and asthma, and sambong tablets for diuretics and kidney stones, are being sold in over 55 areas in the National Capital Region since last year. This year, the herbal medicines will be distributed all over the country.

Through research, simple technologies on planting lagundi and sambong have been developed. Within 7-8 months time, a 1-ha plantation can sell up to P2M worth of lagundi leaves, while production costs are estimated at P0.5M.

A word of precaution: make sure that the five-leaved variety of lagundi is being used, as the three-leaved variety is poisonous. To be sure you are planting the five-leaved variety, get authentic lagundi seedlings from the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) Department of Horticulture.

Information on lagundi, sambong and other medicinal plants are available at the Plant Resources of South-East Asia (PROSEA) Herbal Homepage hosted by the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD) Homepage with the address: HYPERLINK http://www.pcarrd.dost.gov.ph www.pcarrd.dost.gov.ph. – S&T Media Service