For the past six months, I have been studying and researching traditional food and medicinal plants, looking at their nutritional value, safety, efficacy, and potency. And I have found a lot of things. Because the study is yet to be published yet, there is little I can really say about it, but the thing is that I'm not really the first person to go down this path. I found numerous studies in the same scope. I have found plants that have anti-diabetic, anti-cancer, hepatoprotective, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, anti-fungal, anti-helminthic...properties, and all these studies have been published in numerous scientific journals and reviewed by peers and accepted by scientific standards. Seriously, just go to google scholar and type in Carissa edulis or Lantana camara, Urtica massaica/dioca (just some of the traditional plants from my country) or any traditional plants from your country that you know. However, in most cases, you'll find that, in food, for instance, traditional plants are shoved aside for modern plants that are less nutritious and far more expensive and more detrimental to the environment. And in medicine, the medicine derived from traditional plants is looked at with sneers and in the case that someone is actually promoting traditional medicine, more often than not, it turns out that that person is just a scammer which further tarnishes traditional plants.

With these benefits of traditional plants, it's only sensible that we include them as we think of sustainable development. I actually think that in my country, traditional plants are crucial to sustainable development. They offer affordable food choices, affordable medicine choices, they pose less environmental harm, and they usually take less time and effort to cultivate (most of them grow wild but if we start using them regularly we'll need to cultivate them). Of course, medicine from traditional plants will need to be put under rigorous testing just like any other medicine because it is, after all, medicine, and that is why all these studies are going on, but I think we have something good here. The major obstacle is that most people here hear 'traditional plants' and go 'ew'. Someone lied to us to nothing of ours was worth anything and some people still believe that. But the thing is, not everything that is modern is good, and not everything that is traditional is bad (and vice versa).