The Nation That Rubber Built

The Nation That Rubber Built

When British botanist Sir Henry Wickham brought Brazilian wild rubber tree seeds to Malaya in 1877, he started what would become an economically and socially significant industry for the country.

Talk about rubber and some people might remember the tappers who were visible only by dynamo-powered torchlights and the crunching of dried leaves on the estate floor as they cycled between rows of rubber trees before dawn.

In the late 1950s, the country produced almost 40% of the world's natural rubber. It was a lucrative industry.

Celine Thomas, now a Penang resident, said that in 1957, she lived in a house smack in the middle of a Bangsar estate, which was then handled by her sectional manager father.

While Bangsar today is a fast-paced, urban nightspot, in those days, there was nothing but hectares of rubber trees, staff quarters, and a lone concrete bungalow with high ceilings where Celine lived.

"(The family home) doesn't exist anymore. Our house was the only house in the estate and it was scary at night to be alone. I always said, when I grow up, I'd never live on an estate because it's so far from anywhere.

"I always wanted to live in town. But my memories of estate life are really fantastic," she reminisced in an interview. "School was 15 miles away, so we used to take a school bus for the estate staff's children - it was quite fun."

While life for some as a result of the local rubber industry may just be an obscure and distant memory now, it has definitely left the nation with tangible, but sometimes forgotten, achievements.

Malaysia became the largest supplier of natural rubber to the US auto industry when the demand for the commodity to make tyres soared as the result of Henry Ford's mass manufactured Model T car in 1908.

Then in 1919, Peninsular Malaya exported nearly 200,000 tonnes of rubber, which added up to half of the world's exports. It was the top producer of natural rubber when demand reached an all-time high as a result of the AIDS epidemic which led to an upsurge in the use of rubber products like latex gloves and condoms in the 1980s. Malaysia continued to blaze the trail as the world's top producer up until 1999, when the industry crashed due to prices plummeting to a 30-year low.

And because Malaysia contributed much of the world's rubber supply, it helped modernise the industry through innovation. The Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia (RRIM) carried out extensive research on raising the yield of trees, which led to the development of new varieties or clones, including disease-resistant trees and those with higher yield.

RRIM also introduced the Standard Malaysian Scheme in 1965, a quality control method that revolutionised the presentation, standards and marketing of natural rubber, to compete with the synthetic rubber market. Under the scheme, rubber is graded technically instead of using the appearance of flaws on sheets.

But most importantly, the rubber industry had a role in building the nation, Malaysian Rubber Board director-general Datuk Kamarul Baharain said.

"The development of the rubber industry in the early days was very much connected to the development of the road and railway systems in the peninsula, which provided easy access to the various ports for exporting rubber," he said. "Over the years, the industry has provided employment to thousands of estate workers and an income source for thousands of smallholders as well as workers in downstream industries."

Furthermore, Kamarul said, aside from tin, rubber was the other economic pillar contributing towards the growth of the country's exports earnings. Malaysia reached record production of natural rubber - some 1,612,480 tonnes - in 1976. The rubber economy, however, declined when the manufacturing and service industries emerged.

Still, there were other ways for rubber to be sold and marketed, Kamarul said. "This period also saw the emergence of increased rubber products for manufacturing activities, which later was further developed under the two industrial master plans. Malaysia became the world leader in the production of gloves, condoms and catheters," he said.

According to the Malaysian Rubber Export Promotion Council, Malaysia supplies 49% of the world's demand for examination gloves, which totalled up to more than RM4 billion in 2005. The country exported some RM647 million of catheters, RM574 million of rubber thread, tubing of up to RM216 million and RM115.7 million worth of condoms.

Today, the Malaysian Rubber Board says there are only 1.2 million hectares grown with rubber - a 40% drop from the 1966 peak of 2.05 million hectares.

Most of Malaysia's natural rubber production currently comes from thousands of smallholdings, which are privately-owned 2ha plots. Gone are most of the vast estates as only 5% of all natural rubber comes from the large estates of old.

But just as Bangsar's rubber estates have been transformed into a wine-and-dine haven for the affluent, the rubber industry may have declined, but what has emerged instead, are the fruits of its economic contribution.

Ooi Ying Nee, The Sun, Monday, August 13, 2007