Word: physical
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...reserves, much of the country lacks electricity. That's because most of its potential fuel is exported to neighboring countries through lucrative contracts that benefit the ruling generals instead of being used at home. The Burmese regime's stated solution to the longrunning national blackout? Jatropha. Also known as "physic nut," the plant produces a green nut that is pressed and processed into a biofuel catching on in entrepreneurial green pockets of the world from Florida to Brazil to India, which has already earmarked 100 million acres for the plant and expects the oil to account for one-fifth...
...Each of Burma's states and divisions was ordered to dedicate around 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) to physic-nut cultivation, pressuring many ordinary citizens into a massive forced-planting campaign, according to human-rights groups. While my friend has enough money to pay for the mandatory seeds, many other Burmese aren't so lucky. Those who refuse to farm physic nut face possible jail time. By the end of 2008, the nation's top brass aimed to have 8 million acres (3.24 million ha) of jatropha scattered across Burma, some in vast plantations run by foreign companies, others...
...however, the junta's planting directive has not been matched by adequate infrastructure to turn those acres into energy, like collection mechanisms, processing plants, distribution systems. My friend dutifully tends his jatropha trees and then watches the seeds fall on the ground and die. In his case, the spindly physic-nut shrubs in his garden are supplanting a fragrant frangipani tree or colorful hibiscus bush. But elsewhere in Burma - a nation where UNICEF estimates malnutrition afflicts one-third of children - farmers have had to put aside valuable crop land for a wasted plant...
...forgetting King Lear in Act II: “O, reason not the need!... / Allow not nature more than nature need, / Man life’s as cheap as beast’s.” Instead, let’s look to Act III: “Take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, / And show the heavens more just.” In a society of ever-increasing inequality, let us show ourselves more just with a more gracious attitude to the unacknowledged citizens of our country...
...Physic-al Attraction...