Word: plante
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Meanwhile, in northeastern Arkansas, Jonesboro was getting word of some 1,800 new jobs from companies like wind-turbine-maker Nordex. Outside of Charleston, the Toyota plant was bringing down production but avoiding major layoffs by giving workers other tasks like training workshops. Going into the recession, each of the six cities had at least one built in advantage: either being a state capitol (Bismarck, Charleston and Cheyenne), hosting a big university (like Arkansas State in Jonesboro and West Virginia University in Morgantown) or sitting on top of a valuable natural resource (natural gas in Casper, coal in West Virginia...
...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 its diesel consumption...
...Puzzlingly, 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...
...Burmese word for "jatropha" sounds like an inversion of the name of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy may be the junta's most potent opposition. By inverting Suu Kyi's name, perhaps the superstitious junta believes that the kyet-suu plant will cause her democracy movement to wither away. (Read about Burma's ethnic minorities...
...Rangoon, I watched on television as generals in oversized camouflage hats were pictured shoveling earth to plant jatropha seedlings. Burmese state television shows an inordinate number of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and ground-breaking rituals, in which military men inaugurate the latest project and broadcasters congratulate their efforts. Eventually, as so often happens in Rangoon, the power failed and the T.V. screen went black. Biodiesel may already be contributing to a green solution in some parts of the world, but it hasn't saved Burma...