RICHES FROM RUBBER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3941, 18 August 1937, Page 10

RICHES FROM RUBBER

SUMATRA TO-DAY. EFFICIENCY AND ELEPHANTS. (By D.B. in Melbourne Age.) For centuries the Dutch have concentrated their colonising efforts in the. Indies almost exclusively on the development of Java. To-day Java is more densely populated than Great Britain, and carries nearly twenty times as many people to the square mile as Sumatra. To-day, too, Java is a country which is still slowly emerging from a long and gruelling depression; the more sober-minded and thoughtful of its citizens cannot see real prosperity ahead. Unemployment and cruelly low wages still haunt the island; while in Sumatra, no one is without work, and there is pay to be earned on a scale almost unheard of in present day Java. What sugar was to. Java, what wool and wheat -are to Australia, rubber is to Sumatra. When rubber slumped. Sumatra was a poverty-stricken place, now that it fetches three times the price it did four years ago, it is the land of opportunity. I spent some days on the largest rubber plantation in the world at Kisaran, in East Sumatra, seeing for myself how Sumatra is becoming rich. More than 10,000 coolies are employed by the company controlling this plantation here and in Malaya. With thenwives and families they form an aggregate of 25,000, for whose housing. livelihood, and medical care the company is responsible. This prodigious task is undertaken in a way that hall marks labour conditions in Sumatra as magnificent indeed. WAGES QUADRUPLED. All labour is imported from Java, where, despite the economic improvement of the last few months, the Javanese coolie can count himself lucky if he earns ten cents (threepence halfpenny) a day. In Sumatra as the employee of -a big American or European owned rubber estate he will earn at least forty cent, and this quadrupling of his income is the least of his benefits. In the new land he is looked after, housed, fed, and kept in health with absolute paternal care. Until recently, long wooden barracks of houses were provided for the coolies, a great advance cn the squalid hut of the average Javanese in his own land. Now, however, these rows of wooden homes, called pondoks, ar ■ being replaced by what are known as labour houses. These are detached or semi-detached houses, so that every coolie may have his own home, which is as much his own, his inalienable castle, as the Englishman’s abode is, proverbially, his. These houses ace provided for their occupants rent free. They are excellently built, really comfortable, and well furnished. There are pictures on the walls, facilities Jor cooking, and every bed has its snowy mosquito net. In the face of such conditions talk of a coolie standard of living becomes pointless. There must be many poor Europeans in every great city in the world (not excluding Batavia), who would be glad of a chance to live as well. In addition to their houses, the cool - ies are given plots of land to cultivate, to grow the crops of rice which will supply them with their daily sustenance. The question of finding enough rice to feed the increasing population of Sumatra has given the authorities no little worry. So far the solution of the problem has lain in the importation of rice from Java. No doubt, however, the expatriate Javanese will welcome the chance he is now given of growing his own rice as at home. The big estates have uprooted plantations of rubber to make room for these new rice fields for him to till. MEDICAL CARE. Not the least of the advantages the new life has to offer the coolie is the medical attention, the health it promises him. The entire population, the 25,000 people maintained by the company I visited on its 100,000 acres in Sumatra and Malaya, are thoroughly inspected twice yearly by doctors who -are trained specialists in tropical diseases. Blood tests are taken from all; every man, woman and child is inoculated against typhoid and cholera. It is realised that the most important service medicine can render (especially with Asiatic patients) is not to cure, but to make it unnecessary to have a cure. Sport is encouraged among the coolies. 1 saw football' played with great zest and with some skill, and there is a sports club built on the site occupied by a ‘Chinese opium market a few years ago. This great plantation does more than give a lifelihood and employment to tens of thousands of .coolies. It sets about the task of producingsolid rubber from the white sap that is tapped from the tree trunks into the china cup with conspicuous efficiency. To-day the industry pays its way. Under world restriction of production, which has been enforce! for the last three years, this plantation is able to produce 85 per cenc. of its possible yield—something like sixty million pounds of rubber annually—and to sell it for a price (four times that of the. slump of 1933) which

keeps the industry alive as a working proposition.

A hundred miles of narrow gauge railway span the plantation, and trains bring the latex, the sap of the rubber tree, to the great factory < n the estate at all hours of the day and night. Here more than 600 Javanese are employed on the various processes which turn out the different grades of rubber —the spray-rubber, which is the unique product of this factory, the crepe, the smoke-sheet or the coarse ground rubber, according to the ever fluctuating needs of the market. Perhaps this morning a cablegram will arrive from headquarters in New York which will entirely change the carefully planned production programme here; ail the processes producing, say crepe, may be called to a halt within an hour to meet the sudden world demand for the smokesheet grade. And every day of the year whatever grade of rubber this vast electrically driven factory may be producing, huge quantities of rubber, which yesterday were sap, leave the plantation for Medan, on the first lap of the long journey that is to end m Europe or America. RUBBER RESEARCH. To-day, I was informed, the work of the planter who_oversees the field operations and is responsible for the tapping of the trees is equalled in importance by the work of the research departments, which plan the healthy and remunerative plantations of to-morrow. A quarter of a century ago the yield of an average acre of rubber trees was about a quarter of what it is to-day. During the years of the war the Dutch advanced the science of rubber-growing by leaps and bounds. I learned with pride from the American general manager of the greatest of rubber plantations that England now leads the world in the field of rubber research. The Rubber Research Institute, supported by the British Estate owners in Malaya,. is to-day the most advanced school in the world in the study of rubber, in sickness and health, in the past, present, and, most important of all, in the future. The inimitable possibilities of the industry in Sumatra have not escaped the Dutch. Though the great estates are peopled with English and Americans, if you are not Dutch you cannot now be given employment on a plantation unless it can be shown that you are a technical expert unobtainable within the Indies. The great plantations leave you with an indelible impression, not of man vanquishing nature in the heart of the jungle, but of business efficiency, method, the smooth running of railway lines, subtle patent processes, and gigantic electrical factories. And yet business efficiency and nature in the raw are never very far apart in Sumatra. As I passed down the edge of the plantation for the last time I said to my guide, “What are those high bamboo stands among the rubber trees for?” “Oh,” he said, “they’re the look-out for the elephant guards. Yes, they (have to keep watch all night. You see rogue elephants from across the road break into the plantations and tear up the young trees with their trunks. They are rather a nuisance.”