Word: sui
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...were wrong. In Pakistan's Baluchistan province, nothing is held in higher regard than a woman's honor, and the allegations of rape have the rough-and-tumble province, rich with natural gas fields, up in arms?literally. Baluch tribesmen have attacked a refinery and pumping station at the Sui gas fields, have sabotaged the pipeline that sends the natural gas to the rest of Pakistan, have blown up railway lines, and have rocketed the provincial capital, Quetta. In response, President Pervez Musharraf has sent 4,500 paramilitary troops, backed by 20 tanks and nine helicopter gunships, to Baluchistan...
...Sui-nong loves thunder. "It makes the mushrooms so scared, they simply jump out of the ground," he jokes. Sui-nong spends each summer scaling 3,500-meter ridges in China's Yunnan province searching for mushrooms of a very special sort: the matsutake, a fungus prized above all others by Japanese gourmets...
...cultivated?attempts to do so have eluded the world's experts. They're anything but easy to find, growing under beds of pine needles or on the roots of ancient fir trees. They have to be rooted out extremely carefully to avoid damage. Scrambling up a vertical ridge, Sui-nong leads us to one of his secret patches?five baby mushrooms nestle under the shadow of a towering tree. He will guard them for two weeks until they reach the right size to fetch a top price...
...matsutake boom has boosted Sui-nong's annual income from $100 to $1,000. Every summer, his family moves its yak, a butter churn and two guard dogs to a simple log cabin in the mountains?their base for the harvest season. "Its only three kilometers away" says Sui-nong one crisp morning as we leave his home, arriving four hours later in a luxuriant green valley strewn with pink and violet wildflowers. From here his family scours the uplands. The locals have never rated matsutake highly (they call them "dirt-termite mushrooms") and still can't believe the prices...
...Sitting around a blazing fire, Sui-nong examines the day's harvest. "Now everybody wants to pick mushrooms. But they pick them when they're too immature, so the mushrooms get fewer and fewer." Competition for matsutake is fierce in the region?resulting in violence and even murder in recent years. Only time will tell whether Yunnan's matsutake industry is sustainable. For now, Sui-nong believes his best hope is a little cunning. "I'm still keeping my patches a secret," he says, "while I pray for more thunder...