Agriculture and Environment: Commodities

Exports of natural rubber collected in Brazil began in the eighteenth century. As far back as the early 1800s there were reports of rubber covered slickers and boots being used by fishermen in the New England cod industry.

Rubber boom of the 1800s
The development of vulcanised rubber in the late 1800s stimulated demand that led to the rubber boom. Instant millionaires were made in the Amazon, Indians were enslaved to gather rubber, and the poor from Brazil and all over the world were induced to move to the Amazon in the search for rubber.

From 1890 to 1910 so much money was made that local elites sent their laundry to Europe where it could be done in clean water. An opera house was built in Manaus that rivalled any in the world.

Tens of thousands of paving stones around the building were replaced with rubber "bricks" at the equivalent of $10 each so that carriages would be silent as they passed. European opera stars came to the Amazon, but many died of fevers and never left.

The "biopiracy" of rubber
But the boom was not to last. Rubber was the object of one of the most publicised cases of alleged "biopiracy" in the world. In 1876 rubber seeds were taken from Brazil by Henry Wickham to Kew Gardens in England (smuggled or legally exported, depending on one's point of view).

Monopoly of Amazonian rubber no more
After addressing propagation problems, seedlings were shipped to British colonies in Asia, in particular Malaysia and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) but also Indonesia. Production began in earnest around 1910, and the monopoly of wild Amazonian rubber was broken. The price plummeted.

Bud grafting to raise productivity
By 1910 plantations had expanded tremendously; 245,000 hectares were being cultivated in Indonesia alone. Research in Indonesia during the early twentieth century led to the development of bud grafting, a propagation technique that greatly raised productivity. At this time rubber was still largely a plantation crop with only 8,100 hectares grown on small farms.

However, with the new easy-to-learn propagation technology, that quickly changed. By 1940, 1.3 million hectares of rubber were grown by small-scale farmers compared to only 0.6 million hectares on plantations. By 1990 the balance had shifted even more with 2.6 million hectares grown by small-scale farmers and 0.5 million hectares on plantations (Burger and Smit 2001).

Only during World War II was wild Amazonian rubber highly sought again, and that was because the Japanese occupied all the rubber plantations in Southeast Asia. The Amazon was unable to provide the quantities of rubber necessary for the war effort.

The search for synthetic substitutes
The Allies searched the Amazon for natural stands but also invested in research to develop synthetic substitutes. After the war production from the Amazon proved, once again, not to be competitive with rubber produced on plantations. After 1947 rubber ceased to be exported from the Amazon in commercial quantities.

Synthetic rubber steals the show
By the 1980s plantation rubber production was in trouble. Synthetic rubber had eroded the market for natural rubber; today natural rubber makes up only 29% of the market. However, there are certain products that cannot be made with synthetic rubber. Airplane tires are 100% natural rubber, and automobile tires are 35-40% natural rubber. These two industries alone account for 70% of the natural rubber market.

In the age of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), natural rubber is indispensable. Neither surgical gloves nor condoms can be made inexpensively from synthetic rubber. For the short term, anyway, natural rubber will have a market, although it is losing market share to synthetic rubber every year.

Timber from rubber trees
Rubber trees can be sold for timber once they have passed their productive life. The wood is a semihard, light-coloured timber. It has a pleasant grain and can be used in wooden utensils, furniture, flooring, and chipboard making. Commercial exploitation has been rapid, and the timber currently commands a high value.

In part the value is related to the ease of harvest associated with any plantation-grown tree. While any rubber trees can be sold for timber, plantation trees are easy to harvest and transport, many trees of harvestable age are located in a confined space, and plantations produce straight logs with few branches close to the ground.