The farmer, a quiet man with an easy smile, has spent a lifetime eating a chilli with a strange name and 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 - with whatever she is serving. In the hills of north-eastern India (Assam), it is called the bhut jolokia, or ghost chilli. Anyone who tries it, they say, could end up an apparition.

"It is so hot you can't even imagine," says Digonta Saikia, working in his fields in the midday sun. "When you eat it, it's like dying." Outsiders, he insists, should not even try it. "If you eat one," he tells a visitor, "you will not be able to leave this place."

The rest of the world should prepare itself.

For this remote region, facing bloody insurgencies, widespread poverty and with its major industry, tea farming, in deep decline, hope has come in the form of the thumb-sized chilli with frightening potency. Guinness World Records rates it the spiciest in the world. If you think you've had a hotter chilli, you are wrong. The smallest morsels of a bhut jolokia can flavour a sauce so intensely it is barely edible. Eating a raw sliver causes watering eyes and a runny nose. An entire chilli is a savage assault on the senses. For generations, though, the bhut jolokia has been loved in India's north-east, eaten as a spice, a cure for stomach troubles and, seemingly paradoxically, a way to fight the crippling summer heat.

 Now, with scientific proof that the chilli has more than 1 million Scoville units - the scientific measurement of a chilli's spiciness - that thrust the bhut jolokia into the record books, north-east India is taking its chilli to the world. Exporters are courting the international community of rabid chilli-lovers, a group that has traded stories for years about a mysterious, powerful Indian chilli. Farmers, too, are planting new fields of bhut jolokias, and government officials are talking about development programs.

Chances are no one will get rich. In a region where good news is a rarity, however, the world record status has meant a lot of pride and a little more business. "It has got tremendous potential," says Leena Saikia, managing director of Frontal AgriTech, a food business in the north-eastern state of Assam that has been in the forefront of exports.