Argeli (Edgeworthia gardneri)

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

Puwamajhuwa (Ilam District)

2015- 24: raw material for Japanese currency notes

April 16, 2024: The Times of India

Puwamajhuwa: The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea estates of India’s Darjeeling district, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on lush hillsides.


But life can be tough. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, afarmer born near Mt Everest. He gave up on those plants years ago and resorted to raising one that seemed to have little value: argeli, an evergreen, yellow-flowering shrub found wild in the Himalayas. Farmers grew it for fencing or firewood. Sherpa had no idea that bark stripped from his argeli would one day turn into pure money —the outgrowth of an unusual trade in which one of the poorest pockets of Asia supplies a primary ingredient for the economy in one of the richest.


Japan’s currency is printed on special paper that can no longer be sourced at home. The Japanese love their old-fashioned yen notes, and this year they need mountains of fresh ones, so Sherpa and his neighbours have a lucrative reason to hang on to their hillsides. 


“I hadn’t thought these raw materials would be exported to Japan or that I would make money from this plant,” Sherpa sa- id. “I’m quite happy. This success came from nowhere.”


Headquartered over 4,600 km away in Osaka, Kanpou Inc. produces paper for the Japanese govt. One of its charitable programmes is to help Nepali farmers in the Himalayas dig wells. Its agents eventually stumbled onto a solution for a Japanese problem.


Japan’s supply of mitsumata, the traditional paper used to print its bank notes, was running low. The paper starts with woody pulp from plants of the Thymelaeaceae family, which grow at high altitude with mo- derate sunshine and good drainage — tea-growing terrain. Shrinking rural populations and climate change were driving Japan’s farmers to abandon their labour-intensive plots. Kanpou’s president at the time knew mitsumata had its origins in the Himalayas. So, he wondered: Why not transplant it? After years of trial and error, the company discovered argeli, ahardier relative, was already growing wild in Nepal. Its farmers just needed tutoring to meet Japan’s exacting standards. A quiet revolution got underway after earthquakes devastated Nepal in 2015. The Japanese sent specialists to Kathmanduto help farmers get serious about making the stuff of cold, hard yen. 


This year, Sherpa has hired 60 locals to help him process his harvest and expects to earn 8 million Nepali rupees ($60,000). Sherpa hopes to produce 20 of the 140 tons that Nepal will be shipping to Japan.


It is an important moment for the yen. Every 20 years, the currency goes in for a redesign. The notes were first printed in 2004 — their replacements will hit cashiers in July.


NYT