XU WEIFENG was nearly killed by raging fever when he was six years old. He lay on a cot in the mountain hut of his corn farmer parents, seemingly destined to become one more unknown victim of malaria, the world’s second biggest killer after Aids.

“Every day the fevers started around four in the afternoon, and for the next ten hours I would not know if I was dreaming or dying,” he recalled this week. Eventually a doctor gave him a concoction of local herbs and Xu quickly recovered. The remedy that cured him is known as artemisinin, and is now being hailed as a life-saver for millions of malaria victims in Africa.

Artemisinin, first mentioned in Han Dynasty medical texts 2000 years ago, looks certain to replace the present remedies whose effectiveness is fast diminishing as malaria develops resistance to quinine. Despite extensive eradication efforts using quinine derivatives over the past 50 years, malaria kills a child every 30 seconds.

The highly effective Chinese herb, known in English as sweet wormwood, is already being grown by the US Army at a secret laboratory in the state of Wisconsin for use by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the main growing region is a remote mountain range in central China, where farmers are now battling to satisfy the world’s sudden demand for the fern-like weed whose medical properties have long been known to local herbalists.

The Beijing Government certified mass cultivation of artemisinin this week and the World Health Organisation (WHO) is planning to buy about 100 million doses of the drug from the Youyang region of Chongqing province by the end of 2005.

Mr Xu, now 26, is one of the local farmers converting entire valleys into shoulder-high artemisinin fields. High above the gorges of the Wu river, for as far as you can see, hillsides are covered in a sea of lush green ferns.

From their scattered huts farmers wearing straw hats follow narrow paths through their shoulder-high crops. They will begin their harvest next week and, since the drug cannot be synthesised, 600 million African malaria sufferers — 10 per cent of the world’s population — are dependent on their success.

“In this region at least, there is now no more malaria,” Mr Xu said.

To promote the cultivation of artemisinin the Chinese Government this year completed a new road to Youyang, cutting travel time through narrow river gorges to the nearest airport from four days to six hours.

“I guarantee we will provide enough land to grow artemisinin, no matter how great the demand of the international community,” said Gong Zemin, Youyang’s Communist party secretary. But in reform-minded China, party secretaries no longer have unlimited power over the economy. Local farmers need to agree to plant herbs instead of corn on their land, a switch many are reluctant to make since they do not yet trust official assurance of world demand.

Holley, a Chinese pharmaceutical company that distributes artemisinin extract, is telling them income per hectare will increase by 150 per cent.

“We hope to double the area under cultivation next year, but even that may not be enough to satisfy demand,” said Nelson Tan, Holley’s medical director.

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