Natural Rubber and Brazil

O.K. MAYBE I'M HAVING TOO MUCH FUN WITH YOUTUBE VIDEOS BUT DAMN, LOOK AT THIS. EVER WONDERED HOW NATURAL RUBBER IS PRODUCED?



1. Rubber workers make incisions in the trunks and in thick branches of Hevea trees.
2. White, sticky latex dripps from the incisions. -> It fills the cups in a couple of hours.
3. Rubber workers cook the flat slabs of rubber.



(The reason why the price of Amazonian rubber fell fourfold in 1913)

Back in 1873 Henry Wickham, an Englishman who
owned rubber forests on the Rio Tapajoz and was known for his botanical
manias, had sent sketches and leaves of the rubber tree to the director of Kew
Gardens in London. He got an order for a quantity of seeds from the yellow
fruit of Hevea brasiliensis. Since Brazil severely punished any leakage of seeds,he had to smuggle them out, which was not easy: ships were meticulously
searched by the authorities. Then, as if under a magic spell, an Inman Line ship
penetrated 1,200 miles further than usual into the interior of Brazil. On its
return, Henry Wickham was aboard as a member of the crew. He had selected
the best seeds after putting the fruit out to dry in a native village, and had put
them in a locked cabin, wrapped in banana leaves and suspended on strings so
that the ship's rats could not get at them. The rest of the ship was empty. In the
port of Belem, at the river's mouth, Wickham invited the authorities to a grand
banquet. The Englishman's eccentricities were notorious--all Amazonia knew
that he collected orchids--and he explained that on order from the English king
he was carrying a collection of rare orchid bulbs to Kew Gardens. As the plants
were very delicate he had them in a hermetically sealed cabin at a special temperature: if it was opened the flowers would be ruined. Thus the seeds reached the Liverpool docks unscathed. Forty years later the British invaded the world market with Malayan rubber. The Asian plantations, skillfully developed from shoots
grown at Kew Gardens, easily supplanted Brazilian production.

- Eduardo Galeano, Open veins of Latin America