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The domestication of the rubber tree: economic and sociological implications
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Oct, 1993 by Richard Evans Schultes
Conditions are, however, somewhat better in most regions of the Amazon than they were sixty or eighty years ago (22), before the Asiatic plantations began to supply the world's need for rubber at better quality and lower cost. In the earlier years of this century, exploitation, cheating in payment, gauging of prices, all kinds of mistreatment, torture and murder were rife in many regions. The incredible atrocities perpetrated by the explorers of the Peruvian Casa Arana in the early decades of this century in the Putumayo area (then held by Peru but now under Colombian jurisdiction) amongst the Witoto and Bora Indians (4) were eventually brought to light partly by popular, international pressure, but primarily by the practical demise of the wild rubber industry when the plantation production was sufficiently available (18, 20, 22).
The powerful words of the German anthropologist, Dr. Theodore Koch-Grunberg, who spent a number of years in the Colombian Vaupes region of the Amazon and who, five years later, returned indicate the horrendous conditions existing in 1910.
Hardly five years have gone by since my last visit to the Caiary-Vaupes. Whoever comes here now will no longer find the pleasant place I once knew. The pestilential stench of a pseudo-civilisation has fallen on the brown people who have no rights. Like a swarm of annihilating grasshoppers, the inhuman gang of rubber barons continue to press forward. The Colombians have already settled in at the mouth of the Kuduyari and carry off my friends to the death-dealing rubber forests. Raw brutality, mistreatment and murder are the order of the day. On the lower Caiary, the Brazilians are no better. The Indians' villages are desolate, their homes have been reduced to ashes, and their garden plots, deprived of hands to care for them, are taken over by the jungle.
Thus a vigorous race, a people endowed with a magnificent gift of bright intellect and gentle disposition, will be reduced to naught. Human material capable of development will be annihilated by the brutality of these modern barbarians of culture.(3)
The economical implications are easy to understand. As the Asiatic plantations eventually began to supply the world's growing need for rubber at a lower price and higher quality than that which could be produced in the jungles from wild trees with no technical supervision, the production of rubber from wild trees gradually became uneconomical--even with cheap and exploited labour--except in the southwesternmost corner of the Amazon, where a much superior quality of rubber was produced, known as "Acre fino," from a local ecotype or strain of Hevea brasiliensis growing on high, well-drained soil instead of the usual swampy or floodable environment.
The growing use of motor vehicles kept the market for the ever increasing plantation. Then much later the aeroplane and eventually the trend of a major part of travel taking to the air created an even greater indispensability for rubber.
During the years between the beginning of dominance of automobile and air transportation and the present, many new uses for the product of rubber plantations have appeared. Several recent economic developments of novel innovations are interesting and, economically, very significant.
