Biofuel Gone Bad: Burma’s Atrophying Jatropha

My friend in Rangoon is a busy man. He manages a couple of companies in Burma’s commercial capital, helps raise his children and regularly makes merit at a Buddhist temple. He also spends time tending to a plant that he knows is only grown to die. In Dec. 2005, Burma’s economically inept junta — one of its leaders once decided to denominate the national currency by multiples of nine because he liked the number — decided that the country’s future lay in a shrub called jatropha.
Although Burma sits on some of the region’s richest oil and natural-gas 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 its diesel consumption by 2011.

Time