For Egypt's sake

By Samir Sobhi

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Calamities accumulate, some natural, some man-made; from pollution to mad cow disease, from terrorism to bird flu. You meet friends and inevitably discussion veers to one sad topic after another.

I was sitting with friends the other day and one of them mentioned wheat. The government is not buying the wheat crop of farmers, he complained. Another pointed out that our farmers are busy producing medical herbs and crops that are essential to the French beauty and pharmaceutical industry.

From what I heard, I gather we're capable of supplying the international pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry with a wide variety of essential herbs. That's good news, considering that the pharmaceutical industry is worth about $75 billion a year. Perhaps we can cash in on some of that income. From ancient times, we've had natural medicinal herbs growing all over the country, from Sinai to the Western Desert. Now pharmaceutical corporations are eager to unravel the mysteries of ancient medicine and develop new drugs and beauty products incorporating exotic herbs. We can help.

We have the land and the water, but we have something more important. We have a genetic pool of flora that is useful to various fields of science. And we haven't lost the ancient wisdom that comes with conventional medicine.

Perhaps we can get the World Health Organisation interested in sponsoring some agricultural products geared to medicinal purposes. Perhaps we can spend more time exploring the commercial aspects of herbal plants. Let's go back to nature, and ask it to help us for once. Let's think of what mother Earth still has in store for us.

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram.