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ndonesia has tremendous potential to be a herbal medicine producer due to its rich diversity in plants with medicinal properties. However, the country still depends heavily on imported herbal medicines.

'We import 60 percent of the herbal medicines and extracts we use from other countries like China and India,' head of the Health Ministry's Java-based research and development center for traditional medicines, Indah Yuningprapti, said recently after a discussion held jointly by the Biodiversity Foundation and the Pertamina Foundation.

Indah said that farmers were uninterested in growing herbs as they were not as profitable as, say, vegetables. As a result, many Indonesian plant-based medicines were disappearing, she said. 'Most farmers that we have invited to grow herbs said that they preferred to grow vegetables because they were easier to sell,' she said.

According to 2012 Health Ministry data, Indonesia has a total of 15,000 medicinal plants, 1,560 of which are defined as rare. The government, represented by the Health Ministry, is trying to protect these plants by issuing Regulation No. 006/2012 on traditional medicine business and industry.

The ministry also launched the first traditional herbal concoctions research center in January 2013 at Tawang Mangu, Central Java, to foster the development of plant-based medicines throughout Indonesia.

Indah added that the government needed the public's help in raising awareness about these local herbs among the younger generation.

'We have developed a medicinal plants for families program to be implemented by parents at home, as well as teachers in schools,' she said.

Liek Irianti, the head of the consumption diversification and food safety center at the Agriculture Ministry, said that teachers could also create school gardens, where students could learn about local vegetables and medicinal plants in a fun way. 'It [a garden] doesn't have to be large. Teachers can use a limited space to create a school garden by growing hydroponic plants,' she said.

Liek added that teachers needed to think carefully about what kind of plants their schools would grow.

'It would be better to grow plants that we are used to eating every day, such as spinach, lettuce, chillies, Chinese cabbage and water spinach or kangkung,' she said.

She also said that teachers could choose to grow medicinal plants that could be consumed as herbal drinks, such as Caesalpinia sappan L, known locally as secang or temulawak, which is recognized for its active ingredient of curcumin.

'Teachers and school staff should be committed to introducing a 'back to nature' paradigm to students to make the school gardens program successful,' she said.

Meanwhile, Indrawan Miga from the Semut-Semut Natural School at Depok praised the school gardens program, initiated jointly by the government and the private sector, as a good way to introduce students to nature. However, he acknowledged that not many teachers had sufficient knowledge of farming or gardening.

'Many schools are reluctant to join this program because the teachers don't know any of the relevant techniques,' he said. 'So, they think it is better to merely focus on improving their students' academic standings.'

He said he hoped the government would provide technical assistance on farming and gardening to those schools that wanted to develop school gardens. (tam)