Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 741712, 28 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/741712
Research Article
Are Famine Food Plants Also Ethnomedicinal Plants? An Ethnomedicinal Appraisal of Famine Food Plants of Two Districts of Bangladesh
Fardous Mohammad Safiul Azam, Anup Biswas, Abdul Mannan, Nusrat Anik Afsana, Rownak Jahan, and Mohammed Rahmatullah
Department of Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Development Alternative, House No. 78, Road No. 11A (new), Dhanmondi, Dhaka 1209, Bangladesh
Received 27 November 2013; Revised 30 December 2013; Accepted 6 January 2014; Published 20 February 2014
Academic Editor: Menaka C. Thounaojam
Copyright © 2014 Fardous Mohammad Safiul Azam et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Plants have served as sources of food and medicines for human beings since their advent. During famines or conditions of food scarcity, people throughout the world depend on unconventional plant items to satiate their hunger and meet their nutritional needs. Malnourished people often suffer from various diseases, much more than people eating a balanced diet. We are hypothesizing that the unconventional food plants that people eat during times of scarcity of their normal diet are also medicinal plants and thus can play a role in satiating hunger, meeting nutritional needs, and serving therapeutic purposes. Towards testing our hypothesis, surveys were carried out among the low income people of four villages in Lalmonirhat and Nilphamari districts of Bangladesh. People and particularly the low income people of these two districts suffer each year from a seasonal famine known as Monga. Over 200 informants from 167 households in the villages were interviewed with the help of a semistructured questionnaire and the guided field-walk method. The informants mentioned a total of 34 plant species that they consumed during Monga. Published literature shows that all the species consumed had ethnomedicinal uses. It is concluded that famine food plants also serve as ethnomedicinal plants.
1. Introduction
Human beings need food for survival and to satiate their hunger. Plants have always constituted a major food source for people throughout the world since the advent of humans. During times of natural disasters like inclement weather conditions, populations suffering from severe food shortages become heavily reliant on wild food plants for survival [1]. This has given rise to the concept of famine plants [2]. Rodale and Mcgrath [3] stated that famine plants have been eaten and utilized for centuries. Certain “wild-foods” are enjoyed and therefore collected and consumed every time when ready and these are important “famine-foods” during periods of food shortage [4].