Rubber

RICHARD TUCKER

In the tropical world's transformation in modern times, large-scale capital investment and consumer demand in affluent economies have displaced natural forests and small-scale farming across wide areas of the moist tropics.

The acreage under rubber trees would have been far greater in recent years, had not the industry developed synthetic rubber during the crisis of supplies in World War II. The technological breakthrough catalyzed by that military emergency transformed the global rubber economy. Since i960 roughly two-thirds of global rubber production has been derived from synthetics, and the other third from trees on lands that had once sustained rain forests. In this segment of tropical forest clearance, the United States dominated market demand, through innovations in the automotive economy.

The story of industrial rubber began in the early 1800s. Rubbery substances derived from the latex of various tropical trees, bushes, and vines had long been in use. But in hot weather they tended to melt and in cold settings they became brittle. In 1837 the American Charles Goodyear invented the vulca­nization process, which stabilized latex products over a wide temperature range, enabled the fabric to stretch, and made it impermeable to moisture, thus opening a wide new range of possibilities for the industrial era, and gave Goodyear's company an early lead in developing product lines and markets.

Searching for sources of latex, commercial adventurers from Europe and the United States scoured the world's tropical lowlands. They experimented with latex from many species; Hevea brasiliensis, a tree endemic to the Amazonian rain forest, proved to be the most desirable source. As world demand burgeoned, Hevea latex eliminated all others from international trade, and the tree was taken to Africa and Asia, where single-species planta­tions replaced rain forest over large areas.

The rubber boom and bust in Amazonia

Hevea grew naturally in wide areas of the Amazonian basin, but always scattered as one tree species among many. This prevented the parasites which had co-evolved with it from concentrating their attacks, as they could when humans planted the trees in dense groves. Beginning in the 1820s British and American explorers and speculators engaged in a strategic race in the Amazon basin, mapping the vast unknown territory and searching for any product which they could commandeer, including rubber. By the 1850s explorers probed several major tributaries of the great river.

International markets for rubber expanded rapidly after the late 1880s, led by the newly expanding tire industry. The interior of Amazonia underwent a boom in speculative land sales in the 1890s, as soon as the Brazilian govern­ment adopted simplified land registration procedures. In 1900 the Amazon basin produced 25,000 metric tons of rubber; by 1909 that figure rose to 40,000 tons. Demand rose even faster, so prices doubled in that decade. Some companies came to be controlled by foreigners, who had larger capital reserves than local people. But foreign speculations never succeeded in controlling the upriver networks, which were dominated by Brazilian land barons.

British entrepreneurs attempted to grow Hevea in dense plantations, but they never succeeded in conquering the tree's fatal disease, the South American Leaf Blight, a fungus which had coevolved with Hevea in the forest.¹ They succeeded in cultivating Hevea in concentrated plantations not in its Amazonian home but in Europe's colonies in tropical Asia, where climate conditions were favorable and leaf blight did not follow it. In the 1870s they succeeded in taking Hevea seedlings out of Brazil, first to Kew Botanical Garden in London and from there to their colonies of Ceylon and Malaya. They established their first full-scale colonial plantations in 1900, and the young trees began to produce latex in commercial amounts in 1910. Dunlop, the dominant British firm, purchased its first plantation in Malaya in 1910. Aided by intense demand during World War I, Dunlop expanded its holdings to 50,000 acres by 1920.^{[658] [659]}

The transformation of world rubber markets was sudden and decisive. After 1912 Brazilian rubber sales on the world market collapsed, and the entire network of Brazilian penetration into the interior of Amazonia fell to pieces. The great forest remained largely intact, though its arteries had begun to open to the world economy. In the late 1920s the American automotive magnate Henry Ford applied his massive corporate resources to another effort to grow Hevea plantations in Amazonia. Within fifteen years his Fordlandia and Belterra plantations proved to be dismal, even ludicrous failures. Monocrop rubber production was not achieved in Brazil, though portions of the deforested land were subsequently capable of producing limited tree and row crops.^[660]

Colonial empires and rubber in Southeast Asia

As soon as it seemed clear that the British experiment with plantation rubber in Southeast Asia was viable, American companies joined them.

Sumatra became the center of US operations, on the agriculture and population frontier.^[661] Until the onset of plantation agriculture in the late nineteenth century, the Deli lowlands outside the coastal entrepot of Medan had supported a thin population of Muslim Malay rice farmers. In the higher reaches Batak hill tribes practiced multi-crop swidden agrofores­try. Local sultans, their capital towns located near the mouths of the short rivers, skimmed tax revenues from the export of forest products, but they had little effective control over the land and its people. Dutch tobacco and rubber planters cooperated with these local rulers.

Distrusting exotic rubber species, the first Dutch planters experimented with Ficus elastica, but Ficus failed to fulfill their hopes. On Java they experimented successfully with Hevea, maintaining close contacts between the Dutch colonial botanical gardens at Buitenzorg (now called Bogor) and the British center at Kew.^[662] The first large plantation of Hevea on Sumatra was begun in 1906. But commercially successful rubber production would need massive capital, large acreage and long leases, and a seven-year wait for the first latex. This necessitated the active support of Dutch administrators for negotiating long leases from local rajas. Over the following years virtually all land that foreign investors thought worth cultivating was leased from the rajas; very little was left to the peasant population for meeting its own subsistence needs.^[663] From 435 acres under rubber in 1902, the figure grew exponentially, to over 320,000 acres planted in rubber groves by 1914.

That acreage was largely carved out of natural forest, but this was only the core of the transformation. The web of transport and settlement infrastruc­ture which arose among the plantations, and the work force of Javanese and Chinese coolie laborers imported to clear the forest, plant the seedlings, and tend the trees, produced far more wide-ranging impacts, rippling outward from the groves across the Deli region. The population of the East Coast region rose from 568,400 in 1905 to 1,693,200 in 1930.^[664] This increase was caused almost entirely by the new export agriculture.

The rubber market was greater than the Dutch planters themselves could finance, so they began searching for additional Western capital. They soon found a major American firm, the United States Rubber Company.^[665] By 1913 US Rubber owned a total of 75,947 acres in Sumatra, the largest single holding in the world designated for rubber cultivation. At its greatest extent, just over 100,000 acres or 150 square miles of property were held by its new subsidiary, the DutchAmerican Plantation Company, HAPM or “Hoppum,” as the company was referred to throughout the rubber world. In 1911 they planted 14,000 acres of trees, or 22 square miles; by 1913 the planted area was over 32,500 acres. A year later Hoppum built the world's largest rubber processing plant on the coast southeast of Medan. That year war broke out in Europe. Responding to escalating wartime prices, HAPM converted 14,200 acres more from forest to plantation in 1915. By that time 14,000 imported Chinese and Javanese indentured workers toiled under 90 European and American supervisory staff.

The first Sumatran rubber shipments to the USA were made in 1915, the year after the Panama Canal opened. Three other US companies soon joined the Sumatran adventure, led by Goodyear, the United States' largest tire producer. In 1917 Goodyear leased a 16,700 acre concession southeast of Medan that was covered almost entirely by primary forest.

In the immediate postwar depression, crude rubber prices collapsed. British rubber corporations in Malaya and Ceylon were faced with fiscal disaster. So Winston Churchill, then British Colonial Secretary, appointed a review commission headed by SirJames Stevenson. The resulting Stevenson Plan of 1922 restricted production on Southeast Asian rubber estates, and prohibited planting of new higher-yielding trees. But the Dutch refused to join the system of production controls, and American interests were unpre­dictable. American importers were determined to free themselves of European-controlled sources. In addition, American attitudes were generally hostile to any regulation of free markets. So the Stevenson Plan had only limited effect in its first years.

In the United States Henry Ford's new assembly lines were creating an automobile production boom. American imports of crude rubber rose from 692 million pounds in 1923 to 888 million pounds two years later.^{[667] [668]} By then American plantations on Sumatra were coming into full production, but American demand was expanding so rapidly in the era of the Model T that US companies had to buy most of their supplies from others.

In 1927 Goodyear leased another huge estate southeast of Medan: 28,600 acres, all virgin jungle except for a small area that had been developed by a former Japanese lessee. Goodyear mobilized 16,000 workers to clear that forest and create Wingfoot Plantation. Ultimately Wingfoot boasted 40,028 acres, all in high-yielding trees.11 In 1933, at the height of their operations, American holdings in Sumatra totaled 218,393 acres, including 131,000 acres actually planted.^[669]

From the start the Dutch and Americans in Indonesia cooperated closely in research that intensified production on the estates.^[670] In a botanical break­through of major importance, Hoppum pioneered a new technique of bud­grafting high-yielding varieties on older, hardy root stock. Planting with high- yielding clones began on a large scale in 1925. In order to approach the full productive genetic potential of the new trees, Hoppum also imported large amounts of American fertilizers. By 1925 the USA supplied 75 percent of all sulfate of ammonia imported into Sumatra. The new trees more than doubled latex yield. This was a decisive step toward the extraordinary increase in productivity that the growers ultimately achieved - more than ten times what the first trees yielded. Intensification, rather than clearing more forest, had become the corporations' major strategy.

The boom years of the 1920s also saw rapid expansion of smallholder rubber production on the periphery of the great Sumatran estates. Farmers in both Sumatra and Malaya could grow Hevea trees as their major cash crop just as competitively as the estate planters, integrating at most a few hectares of rubber into the varied subsistence production of their annual and tree crops. A census at the end of the 1930s indicated that over one million hectares had been cleared by smallholders, who tapped their own trees and processed

the latex into brown sheets of crude rubber, which they then sold to Chinese middlemen.^[671]

The fourth colonial competitor in the region was France, in its colonies in Indochina. The French government and its allied corporate interests, deter­mined to establish a production system independent of the British and Dutch, organized a Rubber Planters Syndicate in Saigon.1^[672] Rubber investors began penetrating the rain forest of Cochinchina and Cambodia in 1907, in a series of small plantations, supported by the first motor roads to penetrate the forests of eastern Cochinchina. By 1913 12,500 hectares were in production (in contrast with 200,000 ha in Malaya and 95,000 ha each in Ceylon and Dutch Indies). Under wartime demand, especially from the United States, by 1921 29,000 ha were planted in Cochinchina alone. By 1929 that figure rose to 90,000 ha.

In these years the Michelin firm emerged as a fully integrated production and sales organization and the leading player among the French.^[673] In 1900 the brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin had begun looking for plantations in Brazil, West Africa, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia. They attempted two plantations in Brazil, but the first soon failed, so they left the other as forest. In 1924-25 the Michelin brothers sent agents to survey all Southeast Asian countries, setting up a trading office in Singapore, and studied the forested hinterland of Saigon, into eastern Cambodia. In 1925 Michelin launched its first Indochina plantations of 10,000 hectares, the forest cleared by coolies from the densely populated lowlands of northern Vietnam.

During the Depression rubber was as much at the mercy of collapsing demand and prices as any tropical crop. Prices on the New York market hit their lowest point in June 1932, as supplies piled up in the warehouses.^[674] Faced with precipitous price drops of 90 percent and more, the corporations chose not to reduce but to increase their production, because the new production of the bud-grafted plantations which they had planted in the mid 1920s was just reaching the market. In order to meet this crisis, the major producers formed the International Rubber Regulation Commission in 1934. The IRRC allowed no new planting of any sort, and limited replanting to 20 percent of existing acreage, for bud-grafted clones. In Indochina state subsidies enabled produc­tion in the French colonies to grow six-fold by 1938, at last meeting all of metropolitan France's needs, plus even larger exports to the United States. This was accomplished by rapid concentration of ownership into several vertically integrated firms, which were closely linked to the major banks in France.

The war in the Pacific, which began in December 1941, spread rapidly through Southeast Asia, as Japanese forces quickly took control of critical military resources, including rubber. In Indonesia Japan's conquest of the Dutch rubber plantations severely damaged production. Japanese policy encouraged peasants to occupy the tobacco and rubber estates, cut down the older rubber trees, and grow their own food. Many plantations were taken over by local warlords and workers' unions. Three years of war, followed by four years of struggle for Indonesian independence, left the plantations badly battered and their former workers in turmoil. A different era in Indonesian and global rubber production would emerge in the 1950s.

In Indochina the Japanese occupiers maintained partial production through the war. But after they were forced out in 1945, war continued there, as the Vietnamese struggled for independence from France. In 1947 Viet Minh units launched attacks on the plantations, beginning the crippling of rubber production. The situation worsened in the American phase of the war in the decade after 1965. Only after the war ended in 1975 could Vietnam begin to bring its rubber plantations back into full production: from 52,000 metric tons in 1985 it rose to 291,000 tons in 2000, the sixth largest producer in the world.

Rubber and forest clearance in tropical Africa

In the three decades before Southeast Asian plantation rubber flooded the international market, the years when global demand was rapidly rising and inadequately supplied, forcing world prices upward, the race for rubber spread throughout tropical Africa. A long history of exports from that region, primarily ivory and slaves, was transformed after 1885, when Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and Portugal carved the map of Africa into zones of colonial control. Each European Power then launched military conquests, setting up administrations and financing the exploitation of primary products of its African lands. In one colony after another, rubber was one of the most promising products.

18 Martin J. Murray, The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina (1870-1940) (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 259-270.

In contrast to Amazonia, the forests of tropical Africa supported a variety of latex-bearing trees and vines. The primary tree species, Funtumia elastica, (most common in West Africa) could tolerate frequent tapping, but its latex would dry up for some years if it was over-tapped for about five years. Latex­producing vines, several species of Landolphia, were even more vulnerable to tapping. Growing high on host trees, they were the primary source of rubber in the Congo River basin, the second greatest rain forest on earth. Scoring their bark easily killed them, and the latex from the higher reaches could be collected only by cutting the vines close to the ground.^[675]

From the early 1890s the European rulers attempted to increase produc­tion and export of rubber, either by encouraging pre-existing networks of small-scale free traders or by granting enormous land concessions to private companies. The initial harvest of rubber from the forest was promising: by 1900 the African continent exported over 15,000 tons, compared with over 26,000 tons from Brazil.^[676]

Similar stories in numerous African colonies marked the tentative increase of rubber exports until about 1900, accompanied by rapid destruction of rubber trees and vines. In nearly every location local labor was coerced into collecting the latex, under conditions that often became notoriously violent. In German East Africa the tapping of wild rubber vines moved gradually inland from the Tanzanian coast along old trade routes, depleting the Landolphia supplies over a widening area.^[677] But the most notorious case was the Belgian Congo, the personal estate of King Leopold from 1885 to 1908. The king granted private concessionaires vast regions of the Congo basin full rights to the natural resources of those lands and full power to coerce a labor force, in return for a major share of the profits. Widespread violence accompanied the almost total depletion of rubber vines, usually within five years of beginning extraction in each area.^[678]

By 1907 or so two forces combined to begin reducing the African produc­tion: disastrously declining sources of wild rubber, and declining prices on the world market. From 1913 onward Southeast Asian Hevea plantation rubber dominated international markets. Only plantations could give Africa a place on the world rubber stage again. This ultimately happened in Liberia on the west coast, where British entrepreneurial initiative made the first attempt. In 1906 the Liberian Rubber Corporation, a subsidiary of Dunlop, opened the first rubber plantations, but they failed to prosper.

Americans entered the African competition after World War I, in Liberia, a country founded by American ex-slaves in the 1830s. This was the only African location where Americans had both major familiarity and a political foothold. Unlike any of the other primary products from tropical trees and plants, rubber came to be considered a “strategic material” in the minds of American military and foreign policy planners. The term “strategic materials” arose during World War I. It denoted those raw materials which the industrial era had made critical for military prepared­ness, and whose sources any powerful country had to control if it was to survive international conflict. The list was primarily metals, but it included petroleum and rubber. From World War I onwards, therefore, rubber imports assumed a strategic priority beyond any other tropical crop.^[679] This was compounded by the civilian market for rubber products. By the early 1920s Americans were purchasing 85 percent of the world’s cars and three-fourths of global rubber production, of which 80 percent was for automobile tires.^[680]

American planners saw that since rubber was a strategic raw material, it was urgent to break out of British domination of international supplies and prices.^[681] In the effort to break British domination of the world rubber economy, no one was more central than Harvey Firestone, the rubber products magnate. During the war he had presided over the Rubber Association of America, which allotted the rubber that the British allowed the USA to import.^[682] Firestone was unwilling to tolerate such a situation. In 1923 he appealed to Congress for support in identifying tropical locations appropriate for growing plantation rubber outside Europe’s colonies in Southeast Asia, a move which might have ecological repercussions around the tropics.

Liberia lay on 350 miles of Atlantic coastline.^[683] The shoreline had no deep water ports. The coast was heavily forested, marked by lagoons and the tidal flats of a series of small rivers. Sandy soils supported dense mangrove forests. Inland, primary forest was dotted with many patches of “low bush,” scrub secondary vegetation resulting from local villagers’ shifting cultivation of crops.^[684] Numerous ethnic groups had emigrated from the savannas of the continent’s interior over the previous several centuries.^[685] They grew upland rice, cassava, and a variety of vegetable and fruit crops, moving gradually from one location to another. In the 1920s there was no railroad to the interior and few good roads were built.

In that setting, American bankers succeeded in taking over a British loan in 1912, when the Liberian government defaulted. After that the USA effectively controlled the Liberian economy. Americans were not interested in a formal empire anywhere in Africa, but control of one area of Africa’s wet tropical zone might well suit American commercial and industrial interests.

Liberia remained a backwater into the 1920s.^[686] In April 1924 Firestone’s team studied Liberia, focusing on the neglected rubber plantation, where they found promising conditions.^[687] In 1926 the Liberian government granted Firestone an enormous concession: 1 million acres of land for 99 years. In return Firestone would build port and harbor facilities, roads, hospitals, sanitation, and hydropower. Firestone would also provide medical staff, a sanitary engineer, a mechanical engineer, an architect and builder, a soil expert, and a forester.

In order to exploit an estate of such a vast scale, Firestone projected $100 million capital costs and a work force of 350,000 laborers. In 1934 the first trees were tapped. Rubber soon produced over 50 percent of Liberia’s exports in value. The scale of the rubber corporation’s effort was daunting for a country of Liberia’s size. Firestone’s labor force was ultimately 50 percent larger than all other wage labor in the country. The main plantation, headquartered at Harbel, was 140 square miles in extent. It employed 21,000 workers by the early 1960s, 3,000 of them skilled and semi-skilled, the rest tappers. Its senior staff was 180, mostly American and European. As an environmental conse­quence, vast acreage of the land was transformed partially from natural or second-growth forest and partially from cropped fields, to massive groves of Hevea trees.

World War II and the rise of synthetic rubber

In the late 1930s, as war loomed again in Europe and the Pacific, diversifica­tion of rubber source locations became an urgent strategic concern for the industrial powers.^[688] Confrontation between the West and Japan over Southeast Asia's strategic materials accelerated. After Japan's 1937 invasion of China, Japanese leaders feared an American and British embargo, espe­cially of aviation fuel, and looked to the Dutch Indies as a source of both petroleum and rubber.

The US government had been attempting to stockpile rubber from Southeast Asia for some time before that, but Britain had been only partially cooperative. At the end of 1939 the USA had less than a three months' supply of rubber on hand, and attempted to expand purchases from the International Rubber Regulation Committee. When Nazi Germany's invasions of adjacent countries began in late 1939, the British-controlled Committee began to loosen its restrictions. Nonetheless, by May 1940 the USA still had only three months' supply of rubber in stockpile.

InJune 1940 the Reconstruction Finance Corporation created four satellite purchasing corporations for strategic materials, including the Rubber Reserve Company. But even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it had reached only 30 percent of its target.^[689] Firestone's production in Liberia was steadily accelerating, but it never accounted for more than 7 percent of the enormous American market.

Only a breakthrough in rubber production could solve the dilemma. Fortunately for the war effort - and in the longer run for the remaining rain forest reserves of the tropical world - a new source of rubber, synthetic rubber derived from petroleum, became available as the war continued, transforming the entire industry. From the 1860s onward, European chemists had been attempting to synthesize rubber from a wide variety of source materials.^[690] Collaboration between the British and German petrochemical industries broke down during World War I, when the Allies blockaded German imports of tropical natural rubber. In desperation Germany mana­ged to produce 150 tons per month of methyl rubber, but automotive tires lost their shape when vehicles were parked for any length of time.^[691] So postwar Germany dropped the effort to synthesize rubber from petroleum.

Meanwhile, in the USA, DuPont succeeded in polymerizing a form of rubber which it called Neoprene. German efforts revived by the late 1920s, as Germany attempted to become strategically independent of imported natural rubber. In a cooperative effort I.G. Farben and Standard Oil of NewJersey negotiated a contract to develop synthetic petrol. IG was already making synthetic rubber from acetylene. In 1930 IG produced acetylene from natural gas; in a stroke of good fortune for Standard Oil and American strategic interests, this product was covered in the basic information-sharing contract. So it was interested in IG's new Buna-S rubber, which was related to the acetylene process. After 1933 the new Nazi regime imported natural rubber from Brazil and elsewhere, but it wanted independence from tropical pro­ducts. It pushed improvements of Buna, but tire treads stripped from their casings when Buna was used heavily. By 1939, at the beginning of the war, Germany had improved Buna enough to meet military requirements, and was able to use it for many wartime purposes, though the greater strength of natural rubber was indispensable for uses such as airplane tires.

As international military tensions rose during the 1930s, the Western Allies were just as vulnerable to disruption of natural rubber supplies as their potential enemies.^[692] By the end of 1939 the American stockpile was only 125,800 tons, hardly three months' supply. As early as 1933-34, Harvey Firestone had attempted to use DuPont's Neoprene to supply the Army with airplane tires. In the summer of 1940 Firestone unveiled viable synthetic tires. Simultaneously Standard Oil continued improving Buna, now with financial support from Congress. At a cost of $700 million, in two years Standard and Firestone reached full-scale production of synthetic rubber based on petroleum and coal, making 1 million tons of rubber per year.

Meanwhile Britain struggled with critical shortages after the 1940-41 German air raids on British cities and industries. In tropical Asia the British and Dutch were caught by surprise in early 1942 by the sudden Japanese conquest of Malaya, Java, and Sumatra. The only natural rubber supplies left were from Ceylon and India. In desperation Britain linked with the USA for synthetic rubber. The British received their first American synthetics in late 1943; by 1944 they were using 75 percent synthetics.

At end of the war, Britain rapidly reconverted to natural rubber.^[693] Until 1947 the British government purchased rubber from its Southeast Asian colonies to deliver to the United States, to pay its wartime debts and accumulate dollars for reconstruction. That flow helped stabilize rubber production there and prepare the plantations for the boom era of the 1950s.

After 1945 the global rubber economy rose steadily, with the reindustria­lization of Europe and Japan, and the expansion of other industrial econo­mies. But because of the rise of synthetic rubber, this did not result in a continuing massive removal of tropical forest. There was a rising percentage of synthetic rubber in the international economy, and particularly in the American industry, which was by far its largest component. Between 1948 and 1973 world demand for rubber rose 6 percent per year. Natural rubber production grew by 3.3 percent per year, but synthetic rubber increased nearly three times as fast, by 9.3 percent per year.^[694] Synthetic rubber produc­tion surpassed natural rubber in 1962; by 1973 it reached two-thirds of total global rubber production. The global acreage under natural rubber remained roughly steady, but steadily rising global consumption had less cumulative impact on tropical land use than it would have had if synthetic rubber had not assumed its major role.

The rubber industry in the United States, with its limited supply base of natural rubber, pushed for further rapid development of synthetic rubber. Until the mid 1950s most production of petroleum-based rubber was in the United States. By 1973, when global production reached 7,295,000 tons, still 40 percent was produced in the USA and Canada.^[695] Western Europe and Japan began large-scale production only after 1960. The primary market was for the booming civilian automotive tire industry. Today two-thirds of all rubber is used by the auto industry, and no economy or consumer culture has been so gripped by that industry as the United States.^[696]

Natural rubber production after 1945

Natural rubber, not its petroleum-based competitor, determines land use in the tropical lowlands. Global production, after its immediate postwar low of 851,000 tons in 1946, quickly revived to 1,890,000 tons in 1950. By 1973, at the onset of the OPEC petroleum era, the figure rose to 3,493,000 tons.^[697] Much of this was produced on acreage which had already been growing rubber trees, as production became more efficient. The United States remained a major consumer, but not permanently the largest. In 1973 North America, including Canada as well as the USA, purchased 757,000 tons of natural rubber from the tropical world. By then Western Europe had surpassed it, with its far greater direct sources of postcolonial produc­tion, buying 921,000 tons. And Japan's purchases from Southeast Asia had risen to 335,000 tons, as Japan's consumer economy became a major source of pressure on tropical resource systems.^[698]

The automotive industry was far and away the largest consumer of natural rubber, especially in the United States. In 1970 400,000 tons of natural rubber went into automotive tires, compared with 168,000 tons for other uses. In contrast, the European Economic Community consumed 384,000 tons of natural rubber in tires and nearly as much, 317,000 tons, for other purposes. Japan's pattern was similar to Europe's.

Since 1945 the geographical pattern of natural rubber production remained stable: over 90 percent has been produced in tropical Asia, about 6 percent in equatorial Africa, and only 1 percent in Latin America. Malaya (renamed Malaysia in 1957) became the dominant producer, its production rising from around 700,000 tons in the mid 1950s to over twice that in the mid-1970s. Indonesia, independent after 1949, produced much slower increases, only to nearly 850,000 tons twenty years later. By contrast, rubber production in Liberia, the largest in Africa, remained a mere 2 percent of the global supply.

Smallholders had emerged as major rubber producers around Southeast Asia. By 1980 they worked 80 percent of the region's total rubber acreage, but production rates on their lands were significantly lower than on the corporate estates. For example, in i960 Malaysia provided 35 percent of world total production, of which 413,200 tons were produced on estates and 292,800 tons were tapped by smallholders, though the acreage under the two cultivation systems was just about equal. Rubber continued to dominate the country's agricultural acreage, occupying two-thirds of the Federation's total cultivated land.^[699]

The long-term environmental legacy for the peninsula was wide areas of lowland forest cleared for rubber groves, with an intensified population of both Malay and Chinese coolie labor on the land. The foreign corporations contributed greatly to making a small country a major player in world markets, and to strengthening the power of the Malayan aristocracy.^{[700] [701]} American investment in direct rubber plantation management in Malaysia ended in the 1950s, when US Rubber sold all its holdings there. By 1973 220,000 hectares were run by British firms and 48,000 run by Singaporean Chinese. The Malaysian industry was dominated by five British corpora­tions which had been there, imbedded in colonial society, since the early 45

1900s.

This was by no means the end of the United States' importance for Malaysian rubber, however. American rubber companies continued to buy large amounts of rubber in Singapore, the world's largest entrepot for the rubber economy, where sales from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand were concentrated.^[702] Chinese firms had gradually eliminated British firms by then. They dealt with Dunlop, Michelin, Goodyear, and other major Western buyers; some of them had their own agents in London and New York.^[703]

Indonesia: nationalist politics and the plantations

American firms, especially Goodyear, gradually returned to their plantations on Sumatra after the war. American companies were reluctant to reopen under Dutch rule, which was tenuous at best in the fighting against Indonesian nationalists. In addition, they would have to return to over­aged stands of trees, since there had been little planting of new stock for several decades (just as everywhere else in Southeast Asia). The 1951 produc­tion figures were half of prewar totals. But there was a price boom during the Korean War between 1950 and 1954. The war caused international prices to triple in 1951, before settling back to pre-war levels three years later. American firms, seeing a major opportunity to supply their military's wartime demands, reopened their plantations on Sumatra, led by Wingfoot, in 1950-51. The Americans immediately began the major job of replanting the old groves with higher-yielding clones. The results were impressive: over 700,000 tons of rubber were exported every year through 1958. But in that year political turmoil once again determined the flow of rubber production, when Indonesia plunged into civil war. Most estates on Sumatra were seriously damaged, as rebels tried to cut off the government's income. By the early 1960s US Rubber was gone from Indonesia, and Goodyear's opera­tions were being liquidated.

After 1965 General Suharto's new regime ushered in an era of political stability and economic growth favorable to the export sector. The rubber economy expanded steadily, largely at the expense of primary forest on the formerly undeveloped Outer Islands, especially Kalimantan, the vast Indonesian segment of Borneo. By 1973 the country's total exports were 886,000 tons, grown on 465,000 hectares of large estates, and over four times as much, 1,841,000 hectares, of smallholdings. In this system productivity was low: 382 kilograms per hectare in Indonesia in 1973, in comparison with 879 in Peninsular Malaysia.^[704] This was more wasteful: more forest had to be felled and burned in order to achieve similar production.

Indonesian Chinese traders purchased semi-processed sheets of rubber from the growers and exported them to Singapore and Penang for further processing and sale to purchasers from Europe and North America. So American and European rubber buyers were ultimately partners in the global economic web which was responsible for the accelerating transformation of Borneo's rain forest away from a natural ecosystem teeming with diverse plant and animal life.

Liberia: Firestone’s heyday and demise

One other important tropical source of natural rubber was still important for American markets: Liberia. Though Liberia's production in the 1960s was only about 2 percent of the world's natural rubber supply, it provided close to 7 percent of the United States' imports. Harvey Firestone had fared well during World War II in his Liberian venture. In i960 Firestone had 69,000 acres of mature trees and 18,000 acres of young pre-producing trees on its estates. Together they produced 80 million tons of crude rubber per year. Their production averaged 12,000 pounds per acre, equal to the highest in the world.

Major new concessions to American firms such as B.F. Goodrich began in 1947, under President Tubman. Tubman also saw the usefulness of diversify­ing the countries to which it was linked through corporate contracts, and began cultivating European firms. In 1952 another enormous 600,000 acre land concession was granted to the German-owned African Fruit Company. This one was along the coastal lowlands; it was intended for banana produc­tion. But Panama Disease soon struck the German operation, so this conces­sion was also converted to rubber. By 1963 5,000 acres were planted in rubber groves, under a manager who had worked for fourteen years for Firestone.^[705]

Tubman's long run as President ended with his death in 1971. In the following years the increasing split between the Americo-Liberian elite and the vast majority of the indigenous population took Liberia into a period of instability and interethnic tensions. In 1980 a military coup led by Samuel Doe overthrew the government. Doe favored his own ethnic group, the Krahn, and unleashed a reign of terror against other segments of Liberian society. In response, American-educated Charles Taylor invaded the country from neighboring Ivory Coast with an insurgent force in 1989, launching a six- year civil war. Doe was killed in 1990, and five other armed factions emerged in the course of the war.

Until 1994 all factions tacitly agreed not to destroy Firestone or the smaller plantations, for any rubber which each faction could export would help finance its military operations. Taylor established his fortress inland from Monrovia, up the road from the Firestone center at Kakata. When he finally attacked Monrovia, fighting quickly engulfed the Firestone plantations. Groves and facilities were largely destroyed. Only in 2005 was the chaos brought under control enough that orderly elections chose Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia's first woman President. By then Liberian society was shredded, the land lay in ruins, and the plantations were partially paralyzed. Liberia's rubber exports were only 2 percent of global production.

Natural rubber, natural forest and the changing global economy

By the early 1970s, less than a third of world rubber production came from natural rubber. Petroleum-based synthetics seemed destined to dominate the industry. Some proponents of synthetic rubber expected the entire natural rubber industry to be on its way to oblivion. But a major shock jolted the global rubber economy in 1973, when the OPEC countries imposed sudden steep price rises for petroleum. As a United Nations survey phrased it,

In 1973 the world rubber economy suffered its first severe exogenous shock: the oil crisis and subsequent sharp rise in crude oil prices. For an industry whose major component - synthetic rubber - depends so heavily on petro­chemical feedstocks, the sudden drastic increase in crude oil prices in 1973-74 represented a major change in cost structures and production economics. The other component of the industry - natural rubber - was less affected directly, but was still subject to all the indirect effects of the oil crisis: acceleration of world inflation, changes in consumer expectations, and rising doubts about the long-term future of world elastomer demand in the energy-intensive automotive sector.^[706]

The immediate price rise of natural rubber was less than half of synthetic rubber's. OPEC had unwittingly introduced a new unpredictability into the rubber economy, and a new level of demand for Hevea rubber. In addition, its superior properties became decisive in tire markets in the 1980s, when radial tires, first created by Michelin's technicians, came to dominate the market. By placing cords at 90 degrees to the spin of the tire, then adding a steel belt beneath the tread, they produced longer life, better fuel consump­tion, and more effective handling.

The last decades of the twentieth century saw major shifts in the global industrial and consumer economy; natural rubber consumption was a major element of that shift. Malaysia and Indonesia remained the two dominant producers, though Thailand and others began to challenge their share: Malaysia shifted from 39 percent of expanding world production in i960 to 34 percent in 1985, though its production nearly doubled. Indonesia dropped from 31 percent to 26 percent, though its production more than doubled.

Consumption patterns changed more dramatically. The United States, which led global consumption until the century's end, expanded from 764,000 metric tons in 1985 to 1,150,000 in 2003. By that year China's rapidly accelerating economy, which had consumed 415,000 tons in 1985 (third in the world, behind Japan), became the world's largest rubber importer by 2003, consuming 1,455,000 tons - and one-third of that was now produced domes­tically, on large new plantations in the south. India's figures expanded similarly: from 233,000 tons consumed in 1985 to 714,000 tons in 2003; two- thirds of that was produced internally, from plantations in the southern hills which dated back to colonial times. Brazil, the demographic and industrial powerhouse of Latin America, was surging in similar fashion: from 98,000 tons in 1985 it grew to 227,000 tons in 2000. In contrast, in Europe in 2000 Germany and France together consumed 520,000 tons, and the shrunken Russian economy consumed only 36,000 tons.^[707]

By the early 1990s natural rubber had risen again to well over one-third of global production. As Wade Davis succinctly notes, “Today the tires of every commercial and military aircraft... are 100 percent natural rubber.... The enormous tires of industrial machinery are 90 percent natural. Nearly half of the rubber in every automobile tire originates on plantations located thirteen thousand miles away.”^[708] Those thousands of miles represented the global ecological links of the automotive age and provided a horizon beyond which consumers saw no need to look.

Further reading

Babcock, Glenn D. History of the United States Rubber Company. Bloomington: Bureau of Business Research, Indiana University, 1966.

Barlow, Colin. The Natural Rubber Industry: Its Development, Technology and Economy in Malaysia. Oxford University Press, 1978.

Brookfield, Harold, Lesley Potter, and Yvonne Byron. In Place of the Forest: Environmental and Socioeconomic Transformation in Borneo and the Eastern Malay Peninsula. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1995.

Davis, Wade. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Dean, Warren. Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History. Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Eckes, Alfred E., Jr. The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

Finlay, MarkR. GrowingAmericanRubber: StrategicPlants and the Politics of National Security. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2009.

Gershoni, Yekutiel. Black Colonialism: The Americo-Liberian Scramble for the Hinterland. Boulder: Westview, 1985.

Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Graveline, Franpois. Des heveas et des hommes: l'aventure des plantations Michelin. Paris: Chaudin, 2006.

Grilli, Enzo R., Barbara Bennett Agostini, and MariaJ. ‘tHooft-Welvaars. The World Rubber Economy: Structure, Changes, and Prospects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Harms, Robert. “The end of red rubber: a reassessment,” Journal of African History 16/1 (1975), 73-88.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Krasner, Stephen D. Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton University Press, 1978.

Marshall, Jonathan. To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1995.

McMillan, James. TheDunlop Story. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989.

Monson, Jamie. “From commerce to colonization: a history of the rubber trade in the Kilombero VaUey of Tanzania, 1890-1914,” African Economic History 21 (1993), 113-130.

Schidrowitz, P. and T. R. Dawson, eds. History of the Rubber Industry. Cambridge: Heffer, 1952.

Slocomb, Margaret. Colons and Coolies: The Development of Cambodia's Rubber Plantations. Bangkok: White Lotus, 2007.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

TengwaU, T. A. “History of rubber cultivation and research in the Netherlands Indies,” in Pieter Honig and Frans Verdoorn (eds.), Science and Scientists in the Netherlands Indies. New York: Board for the Netherlands Indies, 1945.

Tucker, Richard P. Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Devastation of the Tropical World. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2000. Condensed and updated edition Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.