PUWAMAJHUWA, Nepal — The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea plantations of India’s Darjeeling district.
But life can be tough in one of the poorest areas of Asia. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near Mount Everest. He resorted to growing a plant that seemed to have little value: argeli, an evergreen, yellow-flowered shrub that grows wild in the Himalayas. Farmers grow it for fences or firewood.
Sherpa had no idea that the bark torn from his algeri would one day become pure money.
Japanese currency is printed on special paper that can no longer be obtained at home. The Japanese love their old-fashioned yen bills, and this year they need mountains of new bills, so Sherpa and his neighbors have a lucrative reason to preserve their hillsides.
“Now I am very happy,” Sherpa said. “This success came out of nowhere; “It grew in my yard.”
Kanpou Incorporated, based in Osaka, Japan, produces paper used by the Japanese government for official purposes. Japan’s supply of mitsumata, the traditional paper used to print its banknotes, was running out. Paper begins with woody pulp from plants in the family Thymelaeaceae, which grow at high altitudes with moderate sunlight and good drainage. The reduction in rural population and climate change were leading Japanese farmers to abandon their labor-intensive plots. The president of Kanpou knew that mitsumata had its origins in the Himalayas. So he asked himself: Why not transplant it? After years of trial and error, the company discovered that argeli, a hardier relative, was growing wild in Nepal. After earthquakes devastated much of Nepal in 2015, the Japanese sent specialists to the capital, Kathmandu, to help Nepalese farmers learn how to meet demanding Japanese standards.
The instructors soon reached the Ilam district. By then, Sherpa was producing 1.2 tons of usable bark a year, boiling it in wooden boxes.
The Japanese taught it to be better to remove the bark with steam. Next comes an arduous process of stripping, beating, stretching and drying. The Japanese also taught the Nepalese to harvest just three years after planting, before the bark turned red.
This year, Sherpa has hired 60 Nepalis to help him process his harvest and hopes to make 8 million Nepalese rupees, or $60,000, in profits. (The average annual income in Nepal is about $1,340, the World Bank reports.) Sherpa hopes to produce 20 of the 140 tons that Nepal will send to Japan. That is the majority of the mitsumata needed to print yen. Every 20 years, the yen changes. The current bills were first printed in 2004 — their replacements will hit cash registers in July.
Before encountering the yen trade, many Nepalese peasants sought to migrate. Now, Faud Bahadur Khadka, an Algerian farmer, is hopeful: “If other countries also use Nepali crops to print their currencies, that will stop the flow of Nepalis migrating to the Gulf nations and India,” he said.
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