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What's a Calgary company doing mucking about with medicinal plants in the rainforest?
by Tracy Johnson -- Avenue Magazine, September 1998

What would possess a group of Calgary businesspeople to fly to South America, canoe down the Amazon River for two days, strap on waist-high gumboots and wade through a primordial swamp swimming with snakes, piranhas, and frogs the size of cats in order to visit a Peruvian shaman?

A vision quest? A passion for overgrown reptiles? Some warped sense of vacation? Money?

A little of each, as it turns out. The lush rainforest of Northern Peru is about as far as you can get from glass and steel towers of downtown Calgary, but this collection of oil executives, computer programmers and sundry other professionals made the journey last June to check out an investment. Their destination: the Isula Biological Preserve where 2,200 acres of Amazon rainforest shelter thousands of species of flora and fauna. Their investment: a Calgary-based company, Medicinal Plant Products, which has special ties to the reserve. The company¹s mission: to manufacture and market herbal remedies harvested from the rainforest while using a healthy chunk of the profits to buy acres of the rainforest, protecting them from developers and expanding the Isula.

A little of each, as it turns out. The lush rainforest of Northern Peru is about as far as you can get from glass and steel towers of downtown Calgary, but this collection of oil executives, computer programmers and sundry other professionals made the journey last June to check out an investment. Their destination: the Isula Biological Preserve where 2,200 acres of Amazon rainforest shelter thousands of species of flora and fauna. Their investment: a Calgary-based company, Medicinal Plant Products, which has special ties to the reserve. The company's mission: to manufacture and market herbal remedies harvested from the rainforest while using a healthy chunk of the profits to buy acres of the rainforest, protecting them from developers and expanding the Isula.

One of the investors involved in this exotic venture is Brad Clarke, a seemingly unremarkable oil and gas accountant who runs the tiny (3 employee) operation out of a plain jane shared office in Bow Valley Square. (You know the kind: a half-dozen small companies, one harried secretary, zero decor). The only hint that two-year-old Medicinal Plant Products (MPP) may be out of the ordinary is that copies of Natural Products Merchandiser and Natural Health Journal are mixed in with back issues of Oilweek Magazine in the reception area.

Clarke, the 43-year-old president of MPP, is a passionate believer in the power of natural remedies. He first came in contact with non-western medicine while volunteering as a hockey coach. "One of my players had chronic asthma, but after his father took him to an acupuncturist, it just disappeared." That brush with complementary medicine led him to several experiences with "miraculous healing" and eventually to the role of general manager of the World Natural Medicine Foundation, an Edmonton based organization that promotes natural medicine.

Enter 45 year old Dr José Cabanillas, a third-generation Peruvian shaman and medical doctor. Cabanillas has spent his entire career trying to blend western science with the traditional herbal medicine passed down through his family. Apart from his research, Cabanillas treats patients around the world with his distinct combination of western and herbal medicine. Cabanillas' connection to Canada is strong, his wife is from Vancouver, and his patient list includes a number of Canadians. It was through one of those Canadian patients that Clarke first heard of and then met the doctor.

When they met in late 1996, Cabanillas was looking for someone to help him market his herbal remedies throughout the world, but was generally mistrustful of western business. It is extremely important to him to protect what remains of Peru's indigenous people, plants and animals. After visiting the Isula Biological Preserve in 1997, Clarke won his trust by committing to give 20 percent of MPPI's profits, or five percent of its revenues, back to the preserve. "I almost felt that the forest was saying: we'll give you the medicines, but you have to protect us," explains Clarke.

That protection will be essential. David Bellamy, a internationally renowned scientist with the Conservation Foundation in London, estimates that Peru holds 82 to 84 percent of Earth's biological diversity. One in four plants found on earth grow in the Amazon Basin and they're in danger of being lost forever: recent statistics show that the Earth's rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.

May Yeung, Clarke's executive assistant, describes the objective of Medicinal Plant Products as "economic botany". "We want Peruvians to make more from sustainably harvesting herbs out of the rainforest, than they would cutting it down."

Preserving the rainforest is a goal that all the company's investors agree with. Pauline Jones and her husband Duncan McCowan are investors who spent time at the preserve last year. "I consider myself to be very analytical," says Jones, "but I could feel the energy of the rainforest, and know absolutely that it is a magical place that needs to be saved."

An admirable goal indeed, but is it attainable? If you go by anecdotal evidence, herbal remedies are skyrocketing in popularity. Who'd even heard of echinacea five years ago? Now everyone takes it. But in terms of cold, hard facts, the U.S. market alone for vitamins, minerals and herbal remedies was estimated at a whopping $5.7 billion in 1997. In Alberta, close to 50% of the population have turned to complementary medicine, according to an Angus Reid poll conducted in 1997.

Medicinal Plant Products seems poised to cash in on this growing market. Its primary product, medicinal extracts, takes up more & more shelf space in health food stores and in the offices of health practitioners. The company's bestseller is a plant called Una de Gato, or Cat's Claw. It's an immune system booster that is used all over South America as a kind of aspirin and antibiotic. Check into the hospital, and you'll be handed a cup of Cat's Claw tea, which has been shown to successfully treat a variety of ailments from Crohn's disease to cancer.

Cat's Claw grows like a giant weed in the preserve. Peruvian workers whose families have harvested the vine for generations shinny up the 400 foot vines at the prescribed time of day and cut down just enough that the vines grow back. It and other herbs are then turned into the finished products you see on store shelves across North America.

MPP is within a breath of raising enough capital to go into the retail business itself. The struggle to raise capital for such an enterprise in no-nonsense Calgary hasn't always been an easy. But if you judge from the guest list from a recent fund-raiser for the Isula Preserve, many high profile Calgarians support the company at least spiritually if not financially. Phyllis Kane, formerly on the board of the Calgary Regional Health Authority, narrated the dinner and auction, which was attended by Judge William Pepler, Kit Chan and Mayor Al Duerr, along with BJ Seaman and renowned complementary medicine guru, Dr Steven Aung, who is an advisor to MPP.

So if you wander into a health food store in the next year or so and purchase products made by Medicinal Plant Products, you could improve your health, and save an overgrown reptile or two.

This article was published in the September 1998 issue of Avenue Magazine, Calgary.

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