Medicinal plants are becoming extinct- says FORIG
Kumasi, Feb 7, Ghanadot/GNA - The Forestry Research
Institute of Ghana (FORIG) has expressed its worry over
the high rate at which medicinal plants in the country
were becoming extinct.
This development, according to the Institute, could have
a multiplying negative effect on the nation’s bid to
achieve a breakthrough in the development of the health
sector and traditional plant medicine, if serious
measures were not adopted to improve the situation.
Dr. Ebenezer Owusu-Sekyere, a Senior Research Scientist
at the FORIG, said majority of Africans depended on
traditional medicine for their health care and that
currently, the African continent has about 2,500 plants
with medicinal purposes and properties.
He was speaking at a day’s project workshop to
brainstorm on the conservation and the utilization of
medicinal plants in Ghana at Fumesua near Kumasi at the
weekend.
The project is being executed under the auspices of the
International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and
being sponsored by Switzerland, Japan and the United
States of America (USA).
Dr. Owusu-Sekyere said, the project would be implemented
in the Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Western, Central and
Eastern Regions and that the FORIG had identified
fifteen communities within these regions in which the
project would be effective.
He said the project looks at the critical importance of
medicinal plants in poor communities where relatively
cheap western medicines remain prohibitively expensive
and also to document the distribution, utilization and
practice conservation methods for sustainable supply of
medicinal plants from three different ecological zones
in Ghana.
He was not happy that habitat destruction and
overexploitation had resulted in he situation where
sources of medicinal were becoming increasingly scarce,
stressing that the time has come for stakeholders to
support the ITTO project to help reclaim the lost
medicinal plants.
Dr. Owusu-Sekyere noted that among some of the
activities to be undertaken during the project included,
ranking of priority medicinal plants species for each of
the beneficiary communities, distribution of rare
seedlings for planting and collection and raising of
planting materials for the preferred but difficult to
propagate medicinal plant species.
GNA
