The hottest chili is ready for the world

CHANGPOOL, India -- The farmer, a quiet man with an easy smile, has spent a lifetime eating a chili pepper with a strange name and a vicious bite. His mother stirred them into sauces. His wife puts them out for dinner raw, blood-red morsels of pain to be nibbled -- carefully, very carefully -- with whatever she's serving.

Around here, in the hills of northeastern India, it's called the "bhut jolokia" -- the "ghost chili." Anyone who has tried it, they say, could end up an apparition.

"It is so hot you can't even imagine," said the farmer, Digonta Saikia, working in his fields in the midday sun, his face nearly invisible behind an enormous straw hat. "When you eat it, it's like dying."

Outsiders, he insisted, shouldn't even try it. "If you eat one," he told a visitor, "you will not be able to leave this place."

How hot is it?

The rest of the world, though, should prepare itself.

Because in this remote Indian region facing bloody insurgencies, widespread poverty and a major industry -- tea farming -- in deep decline, hope has come in the form of this thumb-sized chili pepper with frightening potency and a superlative rating: the spiciest chili in the world. A few months ago, Guinness World Records made it official.

If you think you've had a hotter chili pepper, you're wrong.

The smallest morsels can flavor a sauce so intensely it's barely edible. Eating a raw sliver causes watering eyes and a runny nose. An entire chili is an all-out assault on the senses, akin to swigging a cocktail of battery acid and glass shards.

For generations, though, it's been loved in India's northeast, eaten as a spice, a cure for stomach troubles and, seemingly paradoxically, a way to fight the crippling summer heat.

Now, though, with scientific proof that barreled the bhut jolokia into the record books -- it has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili's spiciness -- northeast India is taking its chili to the outside world.

Economic impact

Exporters are eagerly courting the international community of rabid chili-lovers, a group that has traded stories for years about a mysterious, powerful Indian chili. Farmers are planting new fields of bhut jolokias, government officials are talking about development programs.

Chances are no one will get rich. But in a region where good news is a rarity, the world record status has meant a lot of pride -- and a little more business.

"It has got tremendous potential," said Leena Saikia, the managing director of Frontal AgriTech, a food business in the northeastern state of Assam that has been in the forefront of bhut jolokia exports.

Last year, her company shipped out barely a ton of the chilis. This year, amid the surge in publicity, the goal is 10 tons to nearly a dozen countries. "We're getting so many inquiries," said Saikia, whose name is common in Assam, and who is unrelated to the farmer. "We'll be giving employment to so many people."

For now, at least, transport issues and a tangle of government regulations mean most exports are of dried bhut jolokias and chili paste. But, Saikia added, the paste can be used for everything from hot sauces to tear gas. Because the heat is so concentrated, food manufacturers in need of seasoning can use far less bhut jolokia than they would normal chilis.

Regional background

India's northeast, a cluster of seven states that hangs off the country's eastern edge, is a place where most people are ethnically closer to China and Myanmar than the rest of India. It's a deeply troubled area, often neglected by the central government in New Delhi, where more than two dozen ethnic militant groups are fighting the Indian government and one another. Many areas remain largely off-limits to foreigners and few days pass without at least one killing.

In Assam, the wealthiest of the region's states, the long-dominant tea industry is facing falling prices and rising costs, and one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. Attacks by the state's main militant group, the United Liberation Front of Asom, and retaliatory government crackdowns, have brutalized the region.

"Maybe this bhut jolokia can help change things here," said Ranjana Bhuyan, a high school teacher shopping for vegetables in the Assamese town of Jorhat on a recent evening. Like most people here, she normally mixes bhut jolokias into sauces or pickles them as a sort of spicy relish, but also likes to eat tiny pieces raw, enjoying the flavor and the sharp jolt.

"People have been eating this forever," she said.