Rubber Rebound?

Chunky Bonaparte-browed President-Dictator Getulio Dornelles Vargas last week came down to earth after 10,000 miles of air travel to watch 40,000 French-trained Brazilian troops in war games. Keeping mum on whether a U. S. or a German military mission would replace the French, whose term expired Sept. 1, he announced praisefully that Brazil's 80,000-man Army was adequate to protect her. War Minister General G. Eurica Dutra beamed, but he knew as well as President Vargas that Brazil's chief value to continental defense lies not in its Army but in its raw materials--among them, rubber.

President Vargas certainly ought to have known that. In his 10,000 miles, which had carried him up the Amazon basin from Belem to Manaus and beyond, he had rubber-necked at a few of an estimated 300,000,000 untapped wild rubber trees, visited Fordlandia and Belterra, where Henry Ford has a $20,000,000 investment in some 2,500,000 acres. On his return the President had some pretty fancy plans to announce.

Ninety-eight per cent of the new rubber the U. S. uses (grand total: 600,000 long tons in 1939) now comes from Malaya, Cochin China, the Dutch and British East Indies, other Far Eastern plantation areas.

If and when Pacific war cuts these supplies, the U. S. will be dependent on: 1) stockpiles; 2) reclaimed rubber; 3) synthetic rubber; 4) foreign sources within the U. S. Fleet's protection. Since big time production of synthetic rubber would be at least two years away, handiest source of new rubber in the Western Hemisphere is the guayule bush in Mexico, Hevea tree in Brazil.

Best all-round rubber tree is Brazil's Hevea brasiliensis, and for decades Para was another name for rubber. As world demand arose, grew, skyrocketed, upper Amazon adventurers rose to be bloody kings and barons. Their technique was simple: enslavement, torture, rape, starvation and murder, plus a fantastic use of company-store methods that had washerwomen in sleazy evening gowns and everybody in debt till the year after eternity. Hundreds of miles up the jungle rivers they fought feudal wars with one another. At the height of the rubber boom in 1909-10, rubber hit a top of $3.06 a pound (present price: 21-c-).

Sixteen hundred ships a year called at Para (now Belem do Para); and a thousand miles up the orchid-stinking Amazon ocean freighters pulled up to the $40,000,000 stone pier and floating dock at Manaus. They took away a single cargo, bolachas (crude rubber balls). They brought a more varied one: pink tiles, champagne, pate de foie gras, grand pianos, gold watches, diamond rings, French lingerie for rubber kings' naked native wives, French mistresses to replace them. Manaus went cultural, built a $5,000,000 opera house, closed it again when half the first opera company promptly died of yellow fever. There were also malaria, hookworm, poisonous insects, a Turkish-bath-like heat that overnight dissolved salt, gunpowder. But there was wealth, the apparently inexhaustible wealth of the "black gold."

Catastrophe was foreseeable and abrupt. Foreshadowed in 1873 when England paid $27 for 2,000 smuggled rubber seeds,* whose planting was a failure, Brazil's ultimate doom was sealed in 1876 when Sir Henry Wickham brought out over 70,000 seeds of which 2,397 took and were eventually transported to British Malaya.

Slowly but inexorably plantation rubber production climbed. It was only three years after the orgiastic peak of the Amazon Valley boom, in 1913, that plantation rubber production overtook wild. Always superior because of controlled quality, it pushed wild rubber from expanding markets till, in the peak year of 1934, out of a world production of 1,019,000 tons Brazil contributed but 9,000 tons, a catastrophic 0.89%. In Iquitos, Peru, upriver from Manaus, docks fell into disrepair. Manaus grew clean and hungry. The State of Amazonas defaulted both internal and external debt regularly each year.

That Brazil, with a potential rubber-growing area of 1,400,000 square miles out of the world's 2,300,000, now supplies less than 1% of world production nettles President Vargas. That bright, chipper dictator has two ideas: that war stoppage of East Indies rubber supply might restore wild rubber's lost market; that if Brazilian rubber can be grown on Malayan plantations, it can be grown on Brazilian plantations as well. To be sure Henry Ford's Brazilian rubber plantations have encountered many difficulties, little commercial success so far, but Vargas thinks this is because Ford's effort is not yet on a production basis.

Vargas' plans:

1) Clear malaria out of the Amazon basin, settle hardworking, nonmigratory families there with Government aid.

2) Improve wild rubber production. Inferiority is not inherent, is caused by ignorant siringueiros indiscriminately tapping any or all of 14 different varieties of rubber tree, so that the bacia (caldron) produces a hybrid bolacha. Remedy: teach them to confine themselves to the Hevea brasiliensis and scientific tapping of trees.

3) Crude Brazilian smoking methods require 30 days to make a bolacha; East Indian methods, ten. Remedy: import from U. S. thousands of machines (cost: $15 each) recommended by Goodyear experts to speed up processing.

4) Chop down trees of poor types, replacing with best types.

5) Select special areas for standard rubber seedling plantations.

6) End the old racket of debt slavery practiced by storekeeping aviados. Vargas recently organized the Instituto Agronomico do Norte whose job it is to wean the siringueiros from their bad production and economic habits.

Those who expect synthetics some day to push rubber off the market entirely, those who think the Mexican guayule bush a better bet, looked dubious; but Vargas was confident. That he had rubber-worried Uncle Sam behind him to some extent was indicated by the fact that at Manaus he received exhaustive reports from experts of the U. S. Department of Agriculture working in conjunction with private experts from Goodyear. In Belem, Vargas lunched with John Ingle, head of Goodyear's Crude Rubber Division, who flew there from Akron as guest of Vargas' golf partner, Brazil's dynamic, smart, supersalesman, Valentim F. Boucas. Observers thought Goodyear would probably accept an invitation to establish an experimental station in Para, might even build a plant. It looked as though Uncle Sam were already beginning to hedge against Pacific blockade.

Apparently Senhor Vargas was quietly hedging, too. Simultaneously United Press at Belem reported the Japanese steamer Buenos Aires was loading Brazilian rubber for Germany via the Trans-Siberian, while a cargo of German chemical products, optical materials and films was en route to Brazil from Vladivostok.

*According to legend the odd behavior of rubber seeds led aboriginal Indians to the discovery of rubber. When ripe the seed-capsules explode violently "with a noise lik.e a rattle of musketry," shoot seeds 60 to 100 feet. Once they stopped running from this barrage, inquisitive Indians returned, saw latex dripping down trunks.

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