Medicinal plants await good marketing

The cultivation of medicinal plants has become a lucrative agribusiness, thanks to the increasing use of relatively safe and affordable plant-based remedies for common ailments. With the depletion of the herbal resources of forests, which have typically been the main source of procuring therapeutically important vegetation, these plants now need to be grown on agricultural fields to meet their burgeoning demand from the pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and other industries. These plants generally do not require much investment, or large landholdings, to grow but give high returns. Some knowledge of the plant-specific agronomic practices is, no doubt, helpful to get good yields but this information is now readily available from various sources. Many public- and private-sector institutions provide training in growing medicinal