RUBBER SOURCE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 13, 16 January 1942, Page 4

RUBBER SOURCE

LOSS IN MALAYA

ROMANTIC HISTORY

The rubber trade of the States and other points east that are threatened by Japanese invasion is of vital interest to the world at large. Though rubber originated in Brazil, credit for the development of its production for trade purposes goes to the East Indies, where over 90 per cent of the world's supply of the raw article was raised when war was declared in 1939.

In 1830 the whole world consumed only 156 tons of rubber—all from Brazil. It was an unsatisfactory article. About that time a frail young man in the United States had a "presentiment" that rubber, if properly manufactured, might be useful to mankind. Again and again he was declared bankrupt: he borrowed thousands of dollars for experiments and dimes for bread; he pawned his umbrella for ferry fare and used his patient wife's last silk petticoat to make rubberised hat.s; he was thrown into debtor's prisons and died insolvent—and his name is immortal: Charles Goodyear!

The experiments of Goodyear, and his discovery that rubber and sulphur when "charred'' would divest the gum of its native adhesiveness opened the way to the romance of vulcanised rubber and the worldwide development of the ruhber trade.

Rise of Malayan Rubber

From far up the Amazon River in 1876, Sir Henry Wickham, a plant student, transported 70,000 "heavy oily seeds" of wild hevea trees to the botanical gardens of Kew. Two months after their arrival in London, nearly 2000 seedlings were shipped from Kew to Ceylon. Some of the Colombo trees were first tapped in ISB2.

Then began in British Malaya and the Netherlands Indies, especially Sumatra and Java, a long, tedious period of experimentation. Some of the imported trees, with ironic justice, were put on dying coffee plantations, supplanting" the crop that was to compensate Brazil for her lost rubber riches. Even in 1900 only four tons of Eastern rubber showed up in world trade, figures and dates dramatise the res: of the story. A little over thirtv years ago, in 1910, Brazil and other wild rubber accounted for S3 000 tons of the world total of 94.000 tons. By 1937 the world was buying more than 1.135.000 long tons of rubber, and of that less than 2 per cent from Brazil. The Changed Position The last figures of rubber exports before the war indicated that the production of the Federated Malay States for the year was about 176,000 tons, while the unfederated States, with Johorc in the lead, produced about the same quantity, making the total Malav production over 350.000 tons. The vearlv proSumatra and other Netherlands East Indies centres was estimated at something over 420,000 tons of rubber, and in 1910 the position was that 97 per cent of all rubber came from the Middle East. Ceylon, with an annual production of about ofi.ooo tons, is the one substantial rubber-growing Eastern possession now held safe bv the Allies.

Having regard to the very large part played by rubber products in the war. it would appear at first glance that occupation by the enemy of lands producing something like 90 per cent of the world's rubber supply would swing an immediate advantage against the Allies. It has to be remembered, however, that rubber is a vegetable product, comparatively and that the bulk of the world's stored supply is in Allied hands. \i<o there are substitutes, and it has been \ei \ largely substitutes and Europe's stored supply that has maintained the German needs for a fierce offensive lastinu two years.

Rubber Returns West Also there is a Western source of rubber which can lie nu'cklv developed to take the place of the lost Eastern rubber plantations. For some years the large American motor tyre companies have been prepai ing their own sources of supplv Western tropics. Early in UU4 there arrived at the old Brazil town of Para, now known as Belem as strange a cargo as Wickham's seeds shipped from there in IS7G. Aboard ship were some 5000 buddings of plantation trees from Malaya, Sumatra and Java. Thev v. ere packed in boxes of sterilised sawdust, from which they drank moisture, and fed on the reserve of their own stumps. All the wav from Singapore, through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic a botanist. Dr. James R. Weir' watched their temperature and moisture. and guarded against infection drying out. and decay. At Belem he supervised their transfer to a steamer which bore them 500 miles up the Amazon, to the mouth of the I apajoz. and then K3O miles more up that tributary to Fordlandia. West May Save the Day There these lineal descendants of trees from the seeds Wickham had carried away wore transplanted hack in the very Tapajoz River area where Sir Henry had collected the seeds. To-day they are thriving at Fordlandia. and on even larger acreage of the newer Ford planunion at Belterra. In 1035 the Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Company planted 000 acres on Gatun Lake, in Panama, with stock from their 2500acre plantation in the Philippines They grew so well that 1000 more acres were put in the following year. Goodyear has other tracts in Costa Rica.

Over two years ago Firestone used 10.000,000 pounds of rubber from the company's /0,000-acre plantation in Liberia. To the present these plantations have been looked on largelv as experiments in America's effort to produce rubber commerciallv in rubber's native home, but they'now take on added value in the coming fight to restore the rubber balance in the war effort.