CROSSROADS: HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Crossroads - how it all began

The book Medicinal Agroecology was inspired at a crossroads of people with very different backgrounds. In his Introduction to Medicinal Agroecology, editor Dr. Immo Fiebrig tells about how the book started as an editorial project with CRC Press / Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Much happened however before the idea of this publication came about. Part of that journey was our joint journey along the path we were guided to by Mucuna pruriens. This vivacious annual creeper, commonly also known as velvet bean and referred to as magic bean because of its wide and varied use since thousands of years in different traditional systems of medicine throughout the world for the treatment of many different ailments, varying from diabetes to neurological disorders and male fertility problems. Even if toxic if not properly consumed, in the Indian tradition both the leafs and beans are known to be cultivated as minor food crop, and in Mexico and Guatemala the bean is used as a coffee substitute, known as ‘Nescafe’.?

The pharmacist

In my foreword to the publication which I had the honour to write, I describe my journey and explain how our paths crossed and aligned. From his background as a pharmaceutical scientist and advisor to a local pharmacy in the small town of Grabenst?tt, South Germany, Dr. Fiebrig had researched Mucuna pruriens (velvet bean) for the treatment of Parkinson’s for patients who - for different reasons - wanted to use this Ayurvedic herbal drug as a replacement for, or addition to their allopathic, synthetic levodopa medication.?

Back then, he was still solely active in the pharmaceutical world, but increasingly unhappy with a system which confines scientists to mimickers of selected plant molecules that form the basis of the pharmaceutical business model, which reduces health to symptoms and medication, and people to patients and consumers of the same. His experience with the people suffering from Parkinson’s who came to the small pharmacy in Grabenst?tt from all over Germany, Austria and Switzerland, desperately looking for alternative of complementary medication which could provide them with better outcomes or which could be tolerated by them at all, made him develop his critical view on the pharmaceutical industry and the Western medicine system in general. Because of this and from his apparent interest in plants which he must have inherited from his illustrious uncle Karl Fiebrig, he decided to leave his pharmaceutical career and shift to studying permaculture instead. This led to several publications on urban permaculture and research positions at the universities of Coventry (Centre of Agroecology, Water and Resilience) and Nottingham in the UK, and the University of Hohenheim in Germany.?

A personal story inspiring a professional career

Our first encounter goes back as far as 2007, quite shortly after I started researching Mucuna p. as an alternative or complementary therapy for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. My husband was diagnosed with the disease early 2003. As no one else in his family had ever developed Parkinson’s or anything like it, we could think of no other cause than exposure to agrochemicals. He had worked with smallholder farmers in Central America for ten years and could have well been exposed to pesticides that had already been banned in the US and Europe, like DDT. But it might just as well have been the back then new herbicide glyphosate, better known under the name RoundUp and introduced in genetically modified crops like soy, corn and cotton from the seventies of the last century onwards. Or even a combination of the same and/or other agrochemicals. Back then, little was known. But if you now search on “DDT AND Parkinson”, “glyphosate AND Parkinson” or “pesticides AND Parkinson” you will find a startling amount of literature evidencing the correlation.?

My research on Mucuna p. soon led me to see the potential of this bean in agriculture, as a cover crop, as a nitrogen fixer, as a mulcher and for animal feed. From my work at international development agency Solidaridad, looking at how to support smallholder farmers in building a better business case with multiple sustainability outcomes, I started looking at Mucuna p. as - if linked to high value markets - a powerful multi-purpose crop, in a multi-cropping system. Apart from Mucuna p., no doubt many other powerful medicinal plants or trees with special properties could be introduced as part of such a system. Because what is to motivate and enable smallholder farmers to shift to agroecological farming practices? They might have a variety of reasons to abandon the industrial practices the single commodity driven systems led them into, but how to even start doing that is the next challenge.?

Why shifting to agricultural systems free of harmful toxic agrochemicals should be everybody’s priority became obvious from my personal experience, as I witnessed how a healthy, strong and intelligent person was gradually reduced to a fully dependent, brain damaged person in a wheelchair in the course of time. As my husband lost his abilities, he lost his earning capacity, we saw our health costs rise and I saw myself limited in my career and earning capacity because of my increasing caretaking responsibilities for him and our two children. Little imagination was needed to understand how people in rural communities would have been thrown into extreme poverty by such an event, affecting at least one or two generations after them. And little imagination was needed to know that they would definitely not have access to the same quality of healthcare and to the indispensable treatment and medication people with Parkinson’s need to keep functioning at all, whether synthetic or herbal. The first being unaffordable or not at hand, the latter thoroughly weakened or destroyed during centuries of colonial rule and Western dominance.?

Our strides became an inspiration for me to start using health as the guiding principle for any strategy related to agriculture. Because when agriculture, meant to support our health through food, becomes a toxic system, causing all kinds of acute and chronic diseases, both through the way our food is produced and through the food that it provides, something is terribly wrong. And when our agricultural systems show such devastating trade-offs like soil erosion, depletion and pollution, surface and groundwater water depletion and pollution, loss of biodiversity in terms of flora and fauna, deforestation, cultural poverty and destruction, economic poverty and malnutrition, something is terribly wrong.?

The engineer of biogenous raw materials

A third person to cross our path was Professor of Engineering of Biogenous Raw Materials at the Wismar University in north Germany, Dr. Christian Stollberg. As a chemical engineer, he had dedicated his professional life so far to extracting highly purified plant ingredients from medicinal plants and transferring his knowledge to students. This took a turn however in 2014, when he visited the Ashram of Kirpal Sagar in the state of Punjab, North India, where he went in search of the origins of some of the plants he’d work with.

In his foreword to the book, Stollberg describes how the state of Punjab, known as the breadbasket of India, was transformed by the introduction of industrial agriculture. He describes how Punjab was once a state with a richly structured and varied landscape, in which an average peasant farmer would grow nineteen different crops. He tells about how that landscape has changed in recent decades into a landscape of vast monoculture farmed land, with seemingly never ending arable lands filled with hybrid wheat, rice and corn, stretching out from one horizon to the other. A place where most farmers live in moderate to extreme poverty, “squashed under a heavy burden of financial debt”. Initially seduced by the short term magic of hybrid seeds and agrochemicals, many find themselves now faced with depleted soils, dependency on costly pesticides and specific synthetic fertilizers. He paints a place where work conditions for farm labourers are dreadful and the incidence of cancer has risen by more than 800% in just a few years, throwing people back exactly in the situation of extreme poverty as I described above. A poisonous and deadly cocktail indeed.

In his case, it was Moringa olifeira, a widely used and applied medicinal tree, popularly also known as “the miracle tree” or “tree of life”, through which a new journey started. Since his visit to Punjab, an extra and indispensable dimension was added to the technological services he would deliver to Western pharmaceutical companies to add value to medicinal plants, like extraction, chromatography and crystallization, which are considered imperative to produce medicinally active ingredients. He then deeply understood that the quality of a plant based product is defined by the way its ingredients are cultivated, in what setting they are cultivated, by whom they are cultivated and what impact they create there.

These insights inspired him to start walking the path, together with three German scientists, a farmer and the ashram, to develop a sustainable supply chain for Moringa olifeira. The hope this raised for a better quality and fairer agriculture, as he puts it, led him to organizing an international symposium on “Medicinal Plants in the Context of Globally Sustainable Land Use and Bioeconomy” in 2017. This symposium attracted the attention of Dr. Fiebrig, who reached out to me to discuss a possible contribution from our side based on our work related to Mucuna p. for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and our ideas on the place Mucuna p. could take in agriculture. He presented an abstract of our work to the organizers and was invited to join as a speaker. The interaction with scientists from very different backgrounds and countries inspired him to the idea for the book which is now being reviewed for you through this series on the book and concept of Medicinal AgroEcology.