Brilliant!
Out of the quagmire that is Afghanistan some good can conceivably come. Well, of course, if peace is achieved much good will result. But there is another area of great contention that begs to be solved. Those great agricultural stretches of land where farmers grow the most cash-reliable crops they are able to: poppies. With the full assent of some members of the Afghanistan parliament, former war lords whose coffers are enriched by their support and trade in the resulting heroin market.Along with those whom they purport to battle, the Taliban, that ultra-orthodox terror group worshipping Allah but whose reliance to fund their activities relies heavily on poppy production and its corrupt and illegal trade. Enter the allied forces of the United Nations and NATO, led by that drug-averse nation the United States, battling the harvesting of poppies and in so doing denying subsistence farmers the wherewithal for existence in a harsh landscape.
Battling also the reality that the Taliban will not smile politely on farmers for refusing to continue growing poppies, even in that other reality where NATO-led troops are actively engaged in crop eradication, leaving them nothing at all for their efforts. Enter a promising new proposal. The Senlis Council has long proposed the legitimization of the poppy crop, seeing it harvested for medicinal pain relief, as medical opiates.
The farmers would receive a fair price for their produce, the world of medicine and pain-infused patients would benefit through greater availability of medical opiates. And then again, there have surfaced alternate, or additional propositions. Amir Attaran, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa has hatched a sterling scheme.
Malaria! It's a third-world scourge, cutting short the lives of countless millions of children and adults. Ever hear of wormwood, Artemesia? I have. It's a very attractive plant, an ornamental that we cherish and admire in our home gardens, with its cone-shaped spray of fragrant flowers. From that plant can be extracted a substance that can cure a lethal strain of malaria: Plasmodium falciparum.
A therapeutic course of pill-taking comprised of that substance has the capability of curing that strain of malaria, according to Dr. Attaran. The protocol using this Artemesia-derived substance is titled Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT). Currently in short supply, Dr. Attaran's brilliant theory is that it can easily be grown in Afghanistan.
Funding could be derived from side-lining current poppy crop-eradication programmes and investing that money instead in paying farmers in Afghanistan to grow sweet wormwood. An industry could be built around the extraction of the ingredient, which could then be turned over to the World Health Organization to finalize the process into medicine.
Anyone got a better idea, one that could trump this one?
Labels: Conflict, Troublespots, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 08, 2007
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