It began innocently enough, like any other workshop — a large university auditorium, speakers from the UN, business, government and an obscure member of the Thai Royal family ringing an auspicious gong.
However, the delegates were not investors or scientists but raw-boned, Thai rice farmers, plied with a lavish two-day luncheon and meditation sessions to hear that if they chose to grow jatropha they could make profits within 12 months.
They were even offered free seeds to start their own plantations and 'grow a golden egg that could be passed from father to son to grandson'. However, unlike the fabled Jack and the Beanstalk, the Thai farmers would be giving up much more than a cow for their handful of seeds and promise of untold wealth.
Much has been written about jatropha, the so-called miracle plant that the New York Times recently called the darling of the second-generation biofuels, and which Goldman Sachs, the world's largest investment bank, has identified as a promising source of biofuel in the future.
Farmers in China, India, Indonesia and Africa are rushing to plant jatropha in what can only be compared to the mass hysteria to grow tulips in the Netherlands in the late 17th century — before the speculative bubble burst.
However, some say the farming of jatropha is a future natural disaster waiting to happen, especially if hybrid strains outgrow plantations and propagate wildly across farmlands, contaminating soil and displacing native species — and eventually people.
While the monstrous, animal-like plants of the post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids remain science fiction, it is worth noting that the jatropha plant propels insects and animals, lives up to 50 years, and that its cuttings take root quickly and easily.
Some claim jatropha will relieve poverty throughout the Third World by allowing the poor to cash in on a low maintenance cash crop that grows anywhere, including rocky and saline soil. There is no evidence though that it can produce seeds under these conditions, especially in the longer term. In fact, there has to date been no substantive research into the long term benefits or effects of farming jatropha.
With corporations currently sizing-up jatropha as a socially acceptable biofuel alternative to fossil fuels, what we do hear is the hype of a potential billion dollar industry — that is billions of dollars of savings and profit for corporations and governments.
Air New Zealand, in collaboration with Rolls Royce and Boeing, claims it will soon launch a test flight of a 747 powered by jatropha biofuel. Phoenix-based Honeywell Aerospace, Airbus, JetBlue Airways and others are working on a Jatropha-based biofuel to reduce costs and increase profitability.
The military regime of Burma has ordered poor subsistence farmers to stop growing rice, once a major export crop, and plant Jatropha as biofuel for domestic consumption and export.
In India, the widespread popularity of Jatropha farming has taken on such epidemic proportions that many are comparing the phenomenon to the 1956 sci-fi film, Invasion of the Body Snatches, where townsfolk are subverted by alien imposters grown from plant-like pods.
However, not everyone is blinded by the hyperbole and hysteria of farming Jatropha. An India-based Yahoo internet group has formed to fight the growing craze and expose the dangers of jatropha, reporting that 50 children were hospitalised by eating jatropha seeds from a plantation near a school.
In Australia the farming of jatropha has been banned in two states as it was deemed harmful to livestock, other plants and people. The ingestion of only four small seeds is said to be fatal.
In the Philippines farmers have already begun abandoning their Jatropha plantations after discovering poor yields and a non-existent market for seeds.
In East Africa there is concern that Jatropha plants in large project areas may invade farmland with a devastating impact on the local food chain and natural biodiversity.
In Thailand, the farmers at the workshop were encouraged to plant Jatropha without being told that there are no trucks, storage facilities or refineries to process the seeds into oil.
The real cost to Thai farmers is much more than any biofuel profits could ever hope to restore. Seventy per cent of all Thais live and work in rural areas outside of Bangkok. Rice farming is part of their traditional lifestyles and history. The planting and harvesting of rice is also celebrated in Thai art, music and poetry.
Biofuel profits would only be spent on a new Toyota pick-up truck or Honda motorbike enriching those corporations and impoverishing the Thai farmers who have to run them at today's fuel prices.
With many of the world's poorest nations teetering on collapse because of rising food prices and civil unrest, how many more farmers will be beguiled — and subverted — by biofuel's blue-sky promise before the speculative greening of the gold rush ends?
Resist? They're here already! You're next!
Harry Nicolaides is a Melbourne-born freelance writer and author who enjoys writing idiosyncratic portraits of the exotic places and people — from Saudi Arabia to Northern Thailand — where he has lived.