Rubber

Rubber is an essential component of modern industry, especially the automotive industry. Although it has thousands of uses, over half of world production is for tires and other automotive parts. Rubber is derived from two different sources: natural rubber, produced from the latex of a tropical rainforest tree, and synthetic rubber, derived from petroleum. For nearly a century it has been one of the dominant commodities in world trade, its production transforming tropical ecosystems and consuming immense quantities of petroleum.

Until the 1940s natural rubber was the only type available. Even this type only became available after Charles Goodyear invented a process to stabilize it by bonding rubber with sulfur (vulcanization) in Akron, Ohio in 1839. He soon fashioned the new material into raincoats and rubber shoes; by the late 1800s it had a widening variety of commercial and industrial uses, and Akron became the world's greatest producer of processed rubber.

Demand for rubber accelerated rapidly from the 1890s onward, to make tires for bicycles and then for automobiles. Until then almost all rubber was produced from a tree native to the Amazonian rainforest. Rubber tappers combed wide reaches of the remote forest and sold the latex they collected to buyers at trading posts along the river for shipment to Europe and North America. This was the first deep industrial penetration into the world's tropical forests. But the process of collecting and processing the latex was difficult and expensive because in the natural forest rubber trees grow mixed with many other species. This dispersion protects the rubber trees from a leaf blight that destroys them if they are planted in concentrated rows, so mass production of rubber from plantations could not be done in Brazil.

But British experimenters beginning in the 1870s transplanted seedlings via Kew Gardens in London to their Southeast Asian colonies of Ceylon and Malaya, where they succeeded in growing large, blight-free plantations. Dutch and French planters similarly transformed their colonial forests in Indonesia and Indochina into rubber groves. By 1910 these plantations produced half the world's supply, and by 1920 they produced 90 percent, a proportion of natural rubber that has remained steady ever since, whereas the Brazilian industry collapsed and never recovered. In Southeast Asia many thousands of acres of natural forest were cleared by a concentrated labor force recruited on multiyear indenture contracts, many of them from overcrowded, poverty-stricken Java and southern China. Dutch plantation overseers in particular became notorious for harsh working conditions.

The international trade in plantation rubber was largely controlled by a British and Dutch cartel centered in Singapore with extensions in Amsterdam and London. These two colonial powers attempted to stabilize rubber prices, which were highly unstable, reflecting widely fluctuating demand but inflexible production. France had its own colonial sources, but German industry, lacking a major tropical colonial base, had to buy its rubber on the open market. The rapidly expanding U.S. auto industry also had to pay whatever price the Dutch and British cartel demanded. American industrialists became determined to develop their own sources of rubber, and fledgling U.S. rubber companies, closely allied with the auto industry, invested in large plantations in British and Dutch colonies in Malaya and Sumatra.

There were also colonial experiments in equatorial Africa's rainforest belt. King Leopold of Belgium, ruler of most of the vast Congo basin since 1885, used notoriously brutal forced-labor practices, coercing Congolese forest people to deliver latex to European buyers. Many Africans died of beatings, imprisonment, or malnutrition when they failed to meet their quotas.

From the start the rubber industry was directly linked to the rapid expansion of the automobile industry. Then came the urgent demand for rubber as a critical military material in World War I, the first war fought on wheels with rubber tires. The war convinced Americans to reconsider their strategic situation, since their sources halfway around the world were vulnerable to potential enemy attack. In 1926 Harvey Firestone, in close cooperation with Henry Ford and the U.S. government, established the world's largest plantation of Brazilian rubber trees on 90,000 acres leased from the government of Liberia.

After the rapid expansion of the auto industry in the 1920s, the global Great Depression resulted in the near-collapse of the rubber industry. Tropical plantations were hit hard; many thousands of laborers were laid off and had to return to subsistence farming. In the process they demonstrated that they could plant and manage rubber trees, often as their primary cash crop, just as successfully as industrial plantations could on a vastly greater scale. It was risky to devote precious crop land to rubber trees because they could be tapped only after they were seven years old, and widely fluctuating prices on the international market made profits unpredictable. But small-holders were more flexible than concentrated plantation laborers, who depended on company commissaries for their food and other supplies. Smallholder production also avoided the ecological costs of the large monocrop plantations. In Thailand, which was becoming the world's second-largest producer after neighboring Malaya, nearly all rubber was produced on small plots.

By the late 1930s a second world war loomed. Japan, rapidly becoming the newest major industrial power, looked toward the West's colonies in Southeast Asia as its potential rubber salvation. Within three months after it struck the U.S. base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japan conquered most Western colonies in Southeast Asia, depriving the Allies of their primary supplies. U.S. sources in Liberia were protected, and before the United States entered the war it had stockpiled a year's supply, much of it from recycled tires. But additional sources of rubber were urgently needed.

Germany was even more desperate for rubber, because its purchases were cut off. Since World War I German chemists had been experimenting with types of rubber derived from petroleum, but early forms of synthetic rubber were unreliable, either turning stiff and brittle when cool or melting in hot weather. In the 1930s I. G. Farben in Germany and DuPont, Firestone, and Standard Oil in the United States developed new types of synthetic rubber primarily for military vehicles and planes. By the end of the war in 1945 the European industrial economies were using mostly synthetic rubber.

In the aftermath of the war the civilian industrial economies boomed, and vast numbers of new car owners demanded sets of tires, which used a high proportion of synthetic rubber. In the thirty years after 1945 total world consumption of rubber rose 500 percent; two-thirds of this rubber was synthetic. Almost all petroleum-based rubber was produced by a few multinational rubber and petroleum firms whose aggressive investment in new products research created a steadily widening range of products. Tropical rubber production for world markets grew more gradually in the postwar mass affluence, but by the late 1970s it was 50 percent higher than thirty years before. Old plantations in Southeast Asia were replanted, this time with hybridized trees which used intensified applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, raising yields several times over. Throughout Southeast Asia, after former colonies became independent, Western companies sold controlling interests to local investors and governments, but remained their primary customers. In 2004 90 percent of the world's natural rubber was produced in tropical Asia. Throughout the tropics as a whole, smallholder acreage has expanded faster than plantations. But the overall environmental impact is similar: reduction of tropical rain forest.

The sudden quadrupling of oil prices in 1974 hit synthetic rubber much harder than natural rubber: it doubled production costs of synthetic rubber, but raised the production costs of natural rubber by less than half. The years of much faster growth in petroleum-based rubber were over. Then radial tires entered the market. Radials require the flexibility of natural rubber for their walls and use a higher percentage of natural rubber than older tire types. Pioneered by Michelin in France in the 1960s, radial-tire production expanded rapidly in Europe and then in the United States and Japan. By the early 1980s more than 80 percent of all new tires were radials. The two types of rubber, roughly equal in amounts produced, were clearly complementary for an industry that thrives on ever-growing global consumer affluence and places ever-increasing pressure on global natural resources.

SEE ALSO Africa, Labor Taxes (Head Taxes); Agriculture; Automobile; Blockades in War; Brazil; Disease and Pestilence; du Pont de Nemours Family; Empire, Belgian; Empire, British; Empire, Dutch; Empire, French; Empire, Japanese; Ford, Henry; Germany;Great Depression of the 1930s; Imperialism; Indonesia;Laborers, Coerced;Laborers, Contract;United States;Vietnam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barlow, Colin. The Natural Rubber Industry: Its Development, Technology, and Economy in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Coates, Austin. The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Dean, Warren. Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Firestone, Harvey S. Men and Rubber: The Story of Business. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1926.

Grilli, Enzo R., Agostini, Barbara Bennett, and HooftWelvaars, Maria J. The World Rubber Economy: Structure, Changes, and Prospects. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Hochschild., Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1998.

Schidrowitz, P., and Dawson, T. R., eds. History of the Rubber Industry. Cambridge, U.K.: Heffer, 1952.

Stern, H. J. Rubber, Natural and Synthetic. New York: Palmerton, 1967.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870–1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Szekely, Ladislao. Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter un Sumatra. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Richard P. Tucker