Let me tell you a story, ’bout a man named Gonzalo…

A Mexican friend of mine… who learned his English watching American television … was trying to come up with Mexican equivalents of some of the classics. While it’s easy to imagine a Mexican Simpsons, or Lucy and Ricky as Mexicans (ok… Ricky would still be Cuban), we couldn’t see Jed Clampett as a Mexican… for the simple reason that if Jed did strike oil, his land would have been nationalized.

Well… maybe there will be the Lomas de Chapultepec Hillbillies in the not to distant future.

All his life elderly Mexican farmer Gonzalo Cardenas has planted a stalky weed that grows wild in southern Mexico to form a sturdy live fence around his tropical fruit trees.

Now it turns out the weed, jatropha, could be used to fuel jet planes and the Mexican government wants farmers to grow entire fields of it to turn into biodiesel.

Known locally as “pinon,” jatropha is a hearty shrub that grows with no special care. Its oil-rich seeds are being eyed as an attractive feed stock for biofuel since the poisonous plant does not compete with food crops.

(Mica Rosenberg, Reuters)

Jatropa is a native American plant, though it grows (as a weed) throughout the world in subtropical climates. Its only agricultural value — until recently — was that livestock wouldn’t eat it. For farmers like Gonzalo Cardenas, it was a cheap, easy way to keep the cows out of the garden. Now, with biofuels being all the rage, its great value is that Jatropa does not compete for land use with food crops like corn, and processing jatropa seed does not end up using more energy than the resulting fuel delivers (another problem with corn).

It’s biggest drawback is that production is not controlled by any of the agri-business giants, and almost no attention has been paid to jatropa by the major financial presses. However, the airlines — which have found jatropa-based fuel more efficient for airplanes than petroleum based jet fuel, is very, very interested. Indian farmers are already supplying jatropa to the airlines, and the Indian government is prodding farmers to commercially grow the until now worthless weed.

Mexico is in an unusual position of being a major oil producer, which can also produce energy from any number of alternative sources.  Countries with a lot of volcanoes are naturals for geothermal power, and high deserts in the tropics (which describes most of Mexico) is the ideal site for solar power production.  Wind turbines in Oaxaca are commercially viable (enough to attract complaints from the Zapatistas, mostly because the turbines were built by Spanish corporate interests) and at least two energy-efficient biofuels — from sugar cane and jatropa — could make at least some agricultural products viable again.