Herbal remedies right under our noses

Founder and Managing Director of
Noelville Ltd., Mr. Denis Noel.

By RuthMoisa Alleyne

Founder and Managing Director of Noelville Ltd., Mr. Denis Noel, is calling on the region to invest more into research that would bolster the herbal remedies industry of the Caribbean.

He was at the time speaking at a Regional Media Workshop on the CARIFORUM-EU Economic Partnership Agreement at The Grenadian.

The two-day workshop, which concluded last week Tuesday, was hosted by the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusam-menarbeit (GIZ) and the Grenada National EPA Implementation Unit (NEPAIU).

The workshop was supported in part by Caribbean Export, through the 10th European Development Fund (EDF) Regional Private Sector Development Programme (RPSDP). The workshop was also being financed by GIZ. Funding has also come from the Caribbean Aid for Trade and Regional Integration Trust Fund (CARTFund).

Arguing that the Caribbean was on record as having the greatest bio-diversity of flora and fauna in the world, he lamented that at this stage of our industrialisation, we had not done enough to capitalise on this industry’s export potential.

The Grenadian manufacturer of several FDA-approved, world-renowned products, such as Nut-Med arthritis pain relief spray and cream, asserted that while other eastern countries were using their herbs to produce medicines, we in the region were busy weeding them out.

“We concentrate on sugar cane, cocoa, nutmeg and bananas ... the rest are considered weeds. [Yet] this is where the future [could] lie for our economies. Everybody is health conscious today. The world is going back to nature, and are looking for natural products. Let us seriously look into herbal remedies.”

Citing several plants and plant-products which his company processes, such as lemon grass and soursop, known to kill cancer cells; the “Tree of Life”, which gets rid of kidney stones; bois bande, a sexual enhancement; and cinnamon, which lowers blood sugar, Noel maintained that instead of closing down our raw material factories, we should instead be looking at the manufacturing of by-products which could earn us more money.

Said Noel, “Historically, Grenada exported cocoa and nutmeg. Today we are [still] exporting raw materials. In the value chain from production to consumption, raw materials occupy a very small part. Back then, no colony was permitted to process its raw materials, it all had to be sent up to [Great Britain], and we got it back in the form of Milo, Ovaltine, Chocolate products ... so all the jobs stayed up there, that was how the colonial system operated. Today we are still following that procedure, we’ve been growing nutmegs for 180 years and we’re doing the same thing today, putting the nutmeg and cocoa in crocus bags and exporting it.”

The manufacturer said that he welcomed regional dialogue on agro-processing, whilst adding that existing processors needed to look into joint ventures so that our farmers could get more income. Failure to do so, he suggested, meant that they would lose interest in producing as it would no longer be viable to them.

“We have the products, but we have to develop them,” said Noel. “[Building our processing capacity ] can bring so much more income into our countries, [thereby] allowing us to covert the Caribbean from [simply] a destination of sun, sea and sand, to one that includes health and wellness,” he added.

He cautioned that if the region continued to rest on its laurels with respect to the development the herbal sector, we would learn the hard way, when some other country or countries discovered our “weeds”, took them back and converted them to million-acre plantations reaping the benefit that was ours to be had.