Green Acres.(Developing bamboo industry in Mexico)

Publication: Texas Monthly

Publication Date: 01-FEB-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Texas Monthly, Inc.

Retired Houston agribusinessman Robert Gow has always taken risks. Now he's betting that bamboo will make him rich--and benefit the Yucatan too.

AT AGE 66, ROBERT GOW could be enjoying a well-earned life of leisure in Houston--puttering around the links with friends at the club or spinning stories on a River Oaks patio about his exploits as a jungle-adventure guide. Retired from a series of enterprises ranging from offshore oil drilling to producing dental crowns and industrial diamonds, he could be confining his yen for risk-taking to the occasional poker game.

But Gow, who used to enjoy ratcheting up the adrenaline flow for the travelers he led into the wilds of Mexico--and who was once in business with former president George Bush and was briefly George W.'s boss--is caught up in his most ambitious venture ever. Not only could it make him a great deal of money but also it could transform a scrubby stretch of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, provide jobs in a destitute area, and even help save the rain forest. And it's all riding on a common, fast-growing plant known for its strength and pliancy: bamboo.

Gow is betting a sizable chunk of his net worth that bamboo will become Mexico's next green gold, the nickname once given to henequen, a kind of agave. In the Yucatan, henequen made huge fortunes for Mexican hacendados, whose huge haciendas had been converted in the nineteenth century from cattle-raising operations to henequen plantations. By the turn of the century, demand for sisal, the fiber derived from henequen that is used for making rope, twine, and rugs, had created one of the world's highest concentrations of millionaires. But in the following decades, the market declined because of the advent of artificial fibers.

Although the demand for bamboo has yet to reach such proportions, Gow is banking on its growing use as a substitute for the hardwoods of the rain forest. He has joined the ranks of bamboo believers, who think that it will one day be used in the U.S. for everything from housing framework and floors to furniture and fencing, as it already is in Asia and some parts of Central America. With a crew of workers...

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