AMAZON RUBBER.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18831, 20 March 1931, Page 11

AMAZON RUBBER.

HENRY FORD’S PROJECT. DIFFICULTIES TO BE FACED. The Annual International number of The India Rubber Journal of London contains an article “With Ford on the Amazon,” with a photograph of MiHenry Ford and sketch map showing exactly where the Ford Concession of 3,700,000 acres (?2,700,000 acres) is placed along the Rio Tapajos which flows up to Santarem, 150 miles away, with Obidos miles away to the left on the other side of a network of islands and rivers.

The account is not pleasant reading from Mr Ford’s point of view. It re minds one too much of poor old Ferdinand de Lesseps’ struggle to overcome the difficulties, theft especially, when striving to complete the Panama Canal. Both ventures will pay if completed. De Lesseps never completed the task he set himself; will Henry Ford overcome his difficulties and complete what he has set out to do? The best paragraph is that dealing with the Japanese. “Since the arrival of the Ford Company in Northern Brazil,” we are told, three “Japanese concessions have been granted and thousands of Japanese are arriving to develop them; they are said to be models of organisation. Coffee, cotton, rice, maize, etc., are being planted and doing well. Readers of “The Rubber Industry of the Amazon” will find that as the work proceeds the suggestions and advice laid down have been so far followed in the main. This is as it should be, as otherwise Mr Ford cannot succeed. “It is safe to say that no company,” the writer in the I.R.J. points out, “in the world could have afforded to spend j so much money on a useless (appar- j ently) project as the Ford Company. No single agricultural venture financed by American or European capital has ever succeeded on the Amazon despite its great natural resources and easy water transport,” and here we would make two comments. The Amazon and especially its tributaries like the Tapajos river are not easy to navigate always, often they are unreliable and dangerous, whilst the resources, like the sailor’s boots at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, no doubt are there but that does not mean that anything on the earth can reach them.

To plant rubber up the Amazon needs an endless flow of money, and reliable scientists, of honest overseers and satisfied labour, and of vast patience.

It also needs first of all and above all, that every ounce of food required for the bulk of the works be produced on the spot, not only to give good healthy rations to the workers but to help start a clearance and opening up the concession without which success cannot be looked for.