MALAYA RUBBER

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21830, 28 September 1945, Page 3

MALAYA RUBBER

SLIGHT DAMAGE

TREES LEFT UNTAPPED

TIN MINES DESOLATE (11 a.m.) SINGAPORE, Sept. 27. From information that is now coming in to Singapore, it would appear that the rubber plantations in southern Malaya have not suffered greatly from Japanese intrusion. The reports that they cut down at least 100,000 acres of rubber in order to produce food crops on the territory appear to be exaggerated. Neither do they seem to have tapped the trees during their years of occupation. Mr. Dickson Brown, the NewsChronicle correspondent who knows the Malayan rubber industry well, says:— “1 have just completed a 700-mile. car journey through some of the best yielding estates in south Malaya. Not once during that journey did I see a single rubber tree that had been tnDped in the past three years. This failure on the part of the Japanese to gather some of the richest of their ccnauests may be explained by the fact that Japan obtained considerable quantities of rubber from the conciuered areas nearer the homeland, French IndoChina, for example.

"Malaya’s rubber industry will soon be back in full produeiion, but the tin industry is most unfortunate, due mainly to our own scorched earth or denial policy at the time of our retreat. Little dredging has been done since the Japanese took over, and the mines are in a sorry state, but they are sick only because the costly dredging machinery was destroyed. Speedy replacements of dredges will revive the industry. The Japanese used the Chinese to win a certain amount of tin by the ancient method of washing and sifting by hand, but it is doubtful if the output was much more than 10,000 tons throughout the Japanese regime. Before the occupation the mines were turning out 100,000 tons annually valued at £16,000,000.”