Herbal high turns to Pacific downer

Kava used to be a popular alternative remedy to combat anxiety and depression, on sale in health food shops and pharmacies across the West. But a health scare has led to its removal from the shelves - and, for thousands of Pacific islanders, the destruction of their livelihoods.

The muddy, bitter extract of the Piper methysticum root has been used in Melanesia and Polynesia for centuries as a sedative and calming recreational drink, but only in the past decade has it begun to catch on outside the Pacific.

Stressed-out Western consumers looking for a natural alternative to anti-tension pills quickly took to the remedy. Medicines based on the kavalactones extracted from the kava root were earning an estimated $30m (£19m) in America by the late 1990s. In 1998, when trade peaked, the main kava-growing nations of Fiji and Vanuatu were exporting $25m (£15.5m) worth every year.

All that changed last November, when the German government announced restrictions on the trade following a medical report blaming kava for liver failure.

Reviews of the research have since challenged its findings, saying that in all but a handful of the 37 cases studied, patients had been using other drugs and alcohol, which could cause liver damage.

But the research has left behind government warnings, restrictions and bans across the Western world.

In Switzerland, Spain, Italy, France and Britain, official warnings and voluntary withdrawal orders have seen kava products swept from the shelves, and in Germany only the lowest-concentration products are still legal.

Sales have collapsed with equal speed in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The impact in the Pacific has been devastating, knocking out three-quarters of the kava export market within weeks. In Fiji, a trade that had earned £240,000 in October 2001 dropped to £45,000. In Vanuatu, export earnings slumped by a similar amount.

As the least developed of the kava-exporting countries, Vanuatu was particularly hard hit by the price drop.

Most kava producers in the south-west Pacific are smallholders who grow it to supplement a subsistence lifestyle. But the surge in prices during the Nineties meant that farmers on remote islands suddenly had access to a reliable source of cash, and they began to acquire the basic rudiments of twentieth-century life, including petrol generators, motorboat buses and schooling for their children.

Now motorboats stand idle because petrol is too expensive and schools on many islands are half empty.

Arripaea Salmon, a kava exporter from Vanuatu, said people on isolated islands had died for want of a motorboat to take them to hospital.

'It's been completely devastating. There was so much hope in it and so much money coming in, then suddenly it stopped,' he said.

Vanuatu-based kava expert Dr Vincent Lebot said the medical problem came partly from techniques used by pharmaceutical companies to extract kavalactones.

'Kava on its own is no more harmful than aspirin, but it has been very little researched and is not well understood,' he said. 'This is a serious battle, because we are competing with big pharmaceutical companies who see kava as a serious competitor to benzodiazepines.'

Many Pacific islanders are optimistic that a forthcoming EU review of the research will lead to a recovery in sales.

For others, low prices have allowed them to drown their sorrows - patronage of Port Vila's kava bars in Vanuatu is booming.