TWO MILLION TREES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 290, 6 December 1929, Page 15

TWO MILLION TREES

DUNLOP PLANATION Two million young rubber trees are now being planted in the Dunlop plantations, Malaya, section by section as the heavy tropical jungle is cleared and its soil prepared over an area ot sixteen square miles. In ten years’ time it is expected that the new trees will yield an annual crop of 5000 tons ot rubber. At present 8500 tons of rubber a year is being tapped from 4,000,000 trees. Every other day a very thin strip of bark is cut from each tree and the fluid rubber drips into the cup below. As each cup receives on the average only half an ounce of dry rubber daily between six and seven hundred million cupfuls of it have to be collected in the course of twelve months

One-third of the native workers are Chinaman but the bulk of them arc Tamil specially recruited from the South of India. Temples for their worship arc built by the Dunlop organisation which also provides houses and hospitals for them, schools for their children and rice at cost price. Golf courses have been laid down for the European staff whose Rugby team is making a bid for the championship of Malaya.

Early next year the dense jungle is to be tackled"over a further sixteen miles of the Dunlop territoi. which is more than 125 miles in extent.