Time Magazine’s Asia edition has a cover article this week that details the life and travels of Marco Polo in the context of today’s emerging economies in China and India:

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Eastern and Western perceptions of one another are thoroughly unstable, an uneasy blend of fascination, fear and greed that lends itself to exaggeration. That all started with Polo (1254-1324), who left a detailed, and still controversial, account of his journeys and the years he spent in the service of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Polo’s Description of the World is the world’s first best-selling travelogue. He set off to the Orient from his native Venice with his father and uncle in 1271. For them it was a return journey; they had already been to what is now Beijing, where the Great Khan had given them a letter to the Pope, and asked them to return with learned men who could teach his people about Christianity. The route, as described by Marco Polo, took them through the Caucasus, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Pamirs and along the Silk Road to Cathay, as he called China. Hardship and danger were balanced by wonder, especially once he arrived at Kublai’s court, where he claimed to have become a court favorite who was sent off on diplomatic missions. He dictated his book, years later, long after his return to Italy, while in jail in Genoa in 1298. Some of the descriptions–from the miracle oil that cures skin trouble in the Caucasus to the giant griffin birds who pick up elephants and drop them into the Arabian Sea–earned him a reputation even in his day as a fairytale spinner rather than a credible witness. [Link]

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p>Also in the issue is an article on western Big Pharma’s attempts to patent knowledge that Indians have been actively using for millenia:

It started with turmeric. An essential ingredient of most Indian curries, the spice was paid tribute by Marco Polo; he compared it favorably to saffron, and noted its importance in traditional medicines. Indeed, Indian doctors have long reached for the knobby yellow root to treat a variety of ailments from skin disease to stomachache and infection. So when two U.S.-based researchers were awarded a patent in 1995 on turmeric’s special wound-healing properties, a collective howl of outrage arose from the subcontinent. “Housewives have been using turmeric for centuries,” says V.K. Gupta, director of India’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources in New Delhi. “It’s outrageous that someone would try and patent it.” The patent was eventually revoked, after a decade-long battle in which the Indian government and private sector spent millions of dollars in legal and research fees to prove that turmeric’s qualities were well documented in ancient medical textbooks. Gupta scrolls through a list of some 5,000 applications currently pending approval by U.S. and European patent offices, jabbing a finger at the most egregious examples of what he considers to be outright theft. He estimates that at least half of those scientific “discoveries” are established remedies in India’s ancient plant-based medical system, called Ayurveda. To Gupta, each application is a jewel plundered from India’s vast trove of medicinal knowledge. “If this isn’t piracy, I don’t know what is,” he says. [Link]

Soon there will be an ever larger economy of exoticism where true health benefits will be of secondary importance to the perception that, because it comes from a far away land, it might just possess magical abilities. Of course, in some cases it really might be a better treatment. This is all eerily similar to perceptions during Marco Polo’s time. The economy of exoticism comes at a price however:

It isn’t just pharmaceutical companies who are interested in Ayurveda. At upscale resorts, Western tourists spend hundreds of dollars on Ayurvedic rheumatism or detoxification treatments. Partly because of its cachet in the West, partly because of better packaging–capsules instead of bitter syrups, pills instead of difficult-to-swallow pastes and powders–Ayurveda is gaining popularity among younger Indians, too. It’s a development that Indira Balachandran, author of a multivolume compendium of India’s Ayurvedic plants, welcomes, but also fears. Unlike conventional medicines, which are based on manufactured ingredients, Ayurveda uses whole plants–usually dozens of them–for each remedy. “The demand for medicinal plants is at an all-time high,” says Balachandran, “but it is accompanied by unprecedented deforestation and unsustainable harvesting. Our medical-resource base is shrinking before our eyes…” [Link]

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p>One solution might be to embrace the economy of exoticism in a sustainable way. I think in some places this is already beginning to happen. Poor rural farmers in India can plant crops that are the lifeblood of these new Ayurvedic treatments and thereby help to prevent deforestation while improving their own economic conditions. If you can plant crops that will result in an Ayurvedic cure for impotence for example, then the Chinese might not pay such a high price for a Tiger penis.

See related posts: Wikiveda, Patenting the chapati, Just say NO to Ayurveda, Pore Some Thekalikya On Me