RUBBER SUPPLY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 August 1942, Page 4

RUBBER SUPPLY

IN NEW GUINEA AREA DEVELOPMENT BY ARMY. SPEEDING UP PRODUCTION. SYDNEY, July 9. Army officers have taken control of all rubber plantations in the New Guinea area, reports Osrnar White, war correspondent of the “Sydney Daily Telegraph.” They hope to speed up rubber production substantially in the coming year to supply the Allied war machine. Rubber is one more reason why New Guinea must be held. With more than SO - per cent of the world’s rubber production in Japanese hands, New Guinea’s once infinitesimal contribution to the world’s rubber stocks has assumed a new and vital significance. Army control aims at rationalisation of New Guinea’s rubber resources to evtract the last drop from latex-bearing areas.

Plantation men with many years’ experience have been recruited and given commissioned rank to run the plantations on “blitz” production methods. They are already achieving results. The best native labour now available in Australia New Guinea gravitates to the rubber plantations. As enemy bombers roar overhead in raids and dogfights with our intercepting forces, the rubber production race continues. Hundreds of rubber-tappers and factory workers go on with their jobs scarcely looking up at the air war which may decide the ownership of New Guinea’s immense undeveloped resources.

When this war is won, New Guinea can never return to its old status as an anthropological museum and an experimental area for native culture. Whoever owns it will develop it. Smallscale experiments have proved the practicability of producing tea, coffee, cocoa, quinine, tobacco, spices, and all the other products which made the Dutch East Indies one of the world s treasure-houses. The Army is making a systematic survey of the resources, and doing more —building roads and developing supply routes, lack of which made New Guinea exploitable only by large-scale capitalists. _____