THE SAD STORY OF AMERICAN RUBBER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 155, 12 June 1942, Page 14

THE SAD STORY OF AMERICAN RUBBER

(Written for "The Listener" by

A.M.

R.

No rubber will be available for civilian use for at least three years. This view is expressed in a formal report presented to the Senate by Senator Truman’s investigating committee on the rubber position. The report declares that there has been gross maladministration of the rubber situation, resulting in a most serious outlook, and points out that relief can be anticipated only from synthetic rubber.-Cable from Washington, May 27. The Secretary of the Department of Commerce, Mr. Jones, revealed that the Government has undertaken a programme designed to reclaim 85,000 tons of rubber yearly from the nation’s million-ton scrap heap.Cable from Washington, May 28. HAT makes the situation revealed above so painful is*the fact that rubber is a 100 per cent. exclusive American product, of which, as late as 32 years ago, not one single milky drop had ever been produced elsewhere Colombus first of Europeans saw it, and wrote home his amazement at seeing Indians playing with "live stones." But the only employment that Europe found for it through three centuries appears in its English name of "rubber" (" Indiarubber" because from Brazil). Then in 1834, one Thomas Hdhcock, by inventing the vulcanizing process, increased a hundredfold its uses, its demand, and its cost. " Such price would not be were the caouchaou plant grown by ourselves in the East," commented Hancock, and by that remark, as much as by his invention, he made himself the father of all the world’s enormous and multifarious rubber industries — and responsible for the Allies’ present plight. For rubber was not then a cultivated crop. It was obtained by tapping forest trees, called Hevea, grey of trunk and shiny of green leaf, that grow wild and always far apart in the Amazon jungles. And the Brazilian Rubber Barons (as a recent cable called their much come-down-in-the-world-successors) who grubstaked the half-breed seringueros who prospected and "bled" it, had sworn blood-curdling penalties upon anyone who should attempt to increase the supply by planting at home or selling seeds abroad. But Empire building piracy had not ended with Drake. In 1873 Sir Joseph Hooker, Director of Kew Gardens, was offered two thousand Hevea seeds by a mysterious "Mr. Farris" and snapped them up without asking any but strictly horticultural questions. However, only twelve germinated! And of these, the six sent to Calcutta-the practical test--all failed to thrive. Brazilian rubber, the world’s only rubber, therefore continued mounting in price until what cost a few pence to gather was selling for 13/- a pound. In the one year, 1910, America’s infant automobile industry built a "million dollar" opera house in the little Amazon town of Manaos (Para) and spangled its multi-coloured inhabitants with two million pounds’ worth of jewellery.

Then came the end of America’s monopoly. For in that year, 1910, cultivated plantation Asiatic rubber first came on the market. Kew had tried again, emptying out every hothouse to attempt a few "takes" at least among 70,000 seeds. Within a fortnight its healthiest successes were off to found the Ceylon rubber plantations -Britain’s principal remaining source to-day. Soon Malaya had 3,000,000 acres. World production leaped from 11,000 tons in 1910, to 317,000 in 1920, to 567,000 in 1927. Yet profits, too, kept pace — thanks mainly on the demand side to Mr. Ford and his competitors, and on the supply side to the British price-fixing " Stevenson Plan." Then the planters’ serried ranks wavered and broke at the onrush of the Great Depression. Unrestrained competition on the heels of unrestrained planting brought rubber to the groundliterally. In 1933 the writer of this article walked across Raffles Square, Singapore, experimentally paved in part with Best Product of Malaya at 134d a pound. In twenty years rubber had passed from being an- American monopoly in short supply into being an East Indian monopoly in enormous suppiy — and just under the Japanese military paw. Ford Steps In However, 1933 and Singapore also witnessed, all unwittingly, the first stroke in the return match that was to restore large scale rubber production, and with it the prospects of victory back to the Americas. The Rubber Cartel, reorganising itself out of its ruins on a British-Dutch-Asia-wide basis, indulgently let members sell seeds to a mad American botanist. They could all the more safely do so (they felt) since Dr. Weir was (Continued on next page)

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buying for a man who, because he had made twenty million cars run where none had been before, thought he could make anything-whether it was peace in Europe or plantations in Brazil. And anyhow the five years that Ford had already spent on this scheme proved him a hopeless failure. Eight million dollars he had poured into his two and a-half million acre Tapajos estate, and had to show for it just what? Item: A collection of circular saws burnt up on Amazonian hardwood. Item: The Model Town of Fordlandia, brick built on Dearborn and Detroit models by Dearborn and Detroit engineers-but empty, since local labour insisted on living in shacks on stilts. Item: A plenteous labour supply, here 700 miles up the river, attracted by wages and hours such as previously only tenors and matadors dreamed of — but each man doing only the immemorial twenty-cent loaf for the new dollar-a-day, and each having brought, according to Latin American tropical custom, all his friends and relations with him to live on ‘the hacienda, and on its mad Gringo haciendado. Item: Scores of square miles cleared and planted with wild Hevea seedlings-but the flat miles flooded, the hillside ones washed bare. Success From Failure Nevertheless the Rubber Cartel soon slammed its stable door. For Ford’s two million pounds’ worth of sad experience applied to those first-class plants that Weir had brought from Malaya was producing by 1937 a success as striking as his previous failure. His first year’s crop, 1941, looked like being a_ million pounds. In five more years it might be fifteen million. Meanwhile in Nicaragua, another company was planting guayale rubber. And in Liberia Harvey Firestone had invested on such a scale as to

have become in effect white dictator. of Africa’s sole remaining black and independent state. Fate’s wheel has swung full-circle. Rubber’s home Continent, assisted under war’s pressure by the world’s brains seeking substitute process, may yet again be meeting its own needs. And Mr. Ford, near-pacifist and ardent anti-Imperialist, whose mighty mass-production plant has now, for the second time, become the industrial main-sheet of a British American war drive, may last longer in history as Henry Ford, farmer, than as Ford the prime product and perfect symbol of an industrial age.

Meanwhile such New Zealanders as have been used to taking nightly refuge under a hot water bottle are shivering themselves off to sleep-or into a state fit to receive the medical certificate that alone can conjure up a bottle. Farmers are thinking dolefully of a possible return to hand milking, and watching the smoke of trains on branch lines long ago permanently closed. Women find. their natural contours breaking through fashion’s decrees and whatevei else it w-s that restrained them. A power stronger and more adamant than even Plunket Nurses i$ rapidly liquidating the lest lingering dummied and bottle-fed babies.