Herbal Medicinal Drinks and Patent

Jakarta as the state capital and metropolitan city with 9 million inhabitants (12 million during the day) represents a big market for consumer goods. The growing market in Jakarta is reflected by continuous constructions of modern malls, besides those of smaller shops and traditional markets.  

Such a growth certainly attracts many informal traders from outside Jakarta. Among those, there is a unique traditional sale which is of our interest here i.e. herbal medicinal drink.  If you walk along the roads mainly in the outskirt of Jakarta, sometime you may see a woman with traditional Javanese costumes carrying a basket containing bottles of various herbal drinks in her back. The saleswomen are usually quite good looking selected on purpose to attract the customers. It is similar to the sale of areca nuts in Taipei, where you can meet beautiful girls wearing mini-skirts selling the nuts displayed along the road to attract the car drivers to stop by.

This mode of traditional herbal sale is common in most cities, especially those in Java. The herbal medicinal drinks that the women carry composes of various mixtures of ginger, cardamom, turmeric, galingale, and their kinds, and noni fruit.   

Traditional herbal drinks are very long time popular to many, but not limited to, Javanese people.  Anybody can get such drinks easily because they are marketed daily from door to door, thanks to the saleswomen,  mostly from Central Java, who cover the need of their customers.

Usually, they have created good communications with their customers so there is practically no problem with the product sales. Despite the medical development and productions of new medicines, daily consumption of those products is still high especially among middle-class families and below. 

Many people believe that consuming herbal drinks might improve their health condition and cure various diseases. Miss Indonesia Qori Sandrioriva from Aceh said that she was accustomed to herbal medicines and used them to improve her beauty as well as cure the diseases such a cold and headache. Some customers from both sexes fanatically consume herbal drinks, as they believe that their sexual performance can be much better after a certain period of herbal consumption.

Either directly or indirectly, the business of herbal drinks helps to reduce unemployment. Those include any related activities such as farmers who cultivate medicinal plants; the breeders of bees and local hens producing honey and eggs; lest to forget, women who market the drinks from door to in various cities in Java. 

These herbal medicines started to be produced in large scales in the early 1960s. Some of those now become big pharmaceutical companies which modernize their herbal process and export some of their products. The products can be consumed instantly in the form of capsules or sachets which contents are consumed by putting in a glass of hot water. This obviously competes and in some degree threatens the traditional home-made herbal medicines and their saleswomen. 

Patented in Foreign Countries

The drinks are the Indonesian product for centuries. However, there is no special documented recipe being used in producing them uniformly. Each producer has its own recipe handed down from generation to generation. This unfortunate situation makes traditional herbal medicine home-made become vulnerable as they are not protected by patent or property rights.  People think that there is no need to patent traditional and Indonesian original products. 

Therefore, people were amazed, when just recently certain products made of cardamon (Curcuma xanthorrhiza) was patented in America. It was not clear what the patent for, whether it deals with certain extraction process or wider scope. The question is, from then on, should people in Indonesia have to get permission when they produce traditional herbal medicines which have been patented by some other countries? 

Last year, President SBY reminded that Indonesia had great potency in herbal business and people in the world dubbed Indonesia the Mega Biodiversity. When he and the first lady visited the R & D Institute of Medicinal Plants of the Health Ministry in Tawangmangu, Central Java, he gave remark that we have a duty to do research for making a breakthrough to find herbal medicines to cure the diseases difficult to treat such as AIDS and cancer.  

Now, as the issue of the herbal medicine patent arises, the government and its institutions such as the R & D Institute of Medicinal Plants, Indonesian Science Institute (LIPI) or other academic institutions should urgently address these grave issues which may hamper the progress of herbal medicine’s development in Indonesia.