**4.3 Medicinal plant research in the Caribbean**

The review of UWI research published between 1948 and 2001 listed 334 medicinal plants of which 194 had been studied in the lab [62]. Aphrodisiac root tonics described 152 mixtures from five Caribbean Islands, four South American and seven African countries that used ingredients from 324 plant species [11]. TRAMIL, which started in 1982 and under whose aegis several ethnobotanical studies have been carried out in the Caribbean, has monographs for 397 plant species (http://www. tramil.net). The second edition of the TRAMIL Caribbean Herbal Pharmacopeia had 99 species with 315 REC (recommended) and 5 TOX (found to be toxic) recipes [68]. The job now is to integrate these sources of Caribbean medicinal plant information into a searchable master database that acknowledges the countries from which this traditional knowledge emanates and returns benefit to the particular Caribbean ecosystem that needs this support to survive for perpetuity.

*Valuing Caribbean Biodiversity Knowledge DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89016*


#### **Table 2.**

*Number of countries in which plant species were identified as being medicinal.*

In temperate countries, single crops cover vast hectares. In the tropics, especially on small islands, this is not possible. In the Caribbean, the number of plants identified as being useful for one purpose or another continues to grow exponentially, for food, agriculture, horticulture and for medicinal uses [7, 11–13, 54–76]. It is no wonder then that there is a strong emphasis on the plant in the Caribbean [77, 78]. Many of the plants mentioned above have laboratory and clinical results indicating their antioxidant, anti-microbial and anti-cancer bioactivity. Indeed, to even attempt to summarize the research done on Caribbean plants would take a whole book. It is likely, that for whatever disease, there is probably a plant, or combination of plants in the Caribbean that can prevent or cure it! This includes very old diseases and new infectious diseases. To have such a rich heritage and not use it is like hanging a cheque on the wall because it looks pretty. We should find ways to conserve and use our rich heritage sustainably for health and wealth. The Caribbean has several Intellectual Property offices that can help with the transition from R&D to business (https://www.ict-pulse.com/2012/08/protecting-intellectual-property-caribbean/) and the Nagoya Protocol to ensure benefit returns to the region. Associated with the protocol is the access and benefit-sharing clearing-house (ABSCH), which is a key tool for enhancing legal certainty and transparency, and to monitor utilization of genetic resources along the value chain. The following medicinal plants have been suggested for further development, see **Table 3** [12, 70].

### **4.4 Case studies**
