Thailand Milking the Trees
February 28, 1999
The crop that dominates the landscape of southern Thailand is rubber trees -- not to be confused with the thick-leaved. rubber plants that grow as ornamentals in pots of American homes. Rubber constitutes the basis for the rural economy of much of this country. In the city of Songkhla, at the Institute for Southern Thai Studies, the tools used in rubber production are displayed. Tribute is paid the economic value of rubber to Thailand at a museum in Trang. The British introduced the first rubber tree seedlings into Thailand in 1901 from Indonesia and Malaysia. Ostensibly, the first rubber tree grown in Thailand still lives the town of Kantang, about 14 miles from Trang.
But it was the explorer Sir Henry Widkham who, in 1876, smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil and dramatically changed the ecology of Southeast Asia. Apparently, Brazilian rubber producers wished to maintain a monopoly of rubber production, so they convinced the government to pass an embargo on exporting the seeds or seedlings of the rubber tree. Interestingly, rubber plantations grow better in Southeast Asia than in their home of South America because of a leaf blight disease in South America.
The rubber tree is milked to obtain latex. A diagonal slash is cut into the bark of the tree and the white, milk-like tree sap drips into a cup. The latex in these cups is collected, strained, diluted with water and treated with acid to cause rubber particles to clump. It is then poured into shallow trays where it is left to harden. Later it is run through a press where it is flattened into sheets, hung on a line to be air -or smoke- cured and then taken to market. When we first saw a load of these sheets on the back of a motorbike, we thought they must be placemats, bath mats or welcome mats or something for the tourist trade. Once we realized what we were seeing, we began to see the same mats hanging on lines by country homes along the highway. Later we stopped at a village to watch the mats being unloaded from motorbikes and a pickup truck and loaded onto larger trucks for shipping. A very fit young man shouldered a load of these mats, walked up a narrow board into the truck and deposited his load.
This crop constitutes both an economic boom and an ecological disaster, simultaneously. The income from rubber production provides a source of income for a large number of Thais. To suddenly remove this crop from Thailand would likely constitute an economic disaster. Certainly, the British who introduced this crop to Thailand could not have guessed the environmental impact it would have. To plant a rubber tree means that a native tree must be removed. Herein lies the source of the disaster to much of the flora and fauna of Thailand. To plant rubber trees required the removal of the native, tropical forests on which wildlife depend. But the wide-scale destruction of forests was slowed considerably when a landslide due to over-logging resulted in the deaths of more than 300 people in what is now Khou Luang National Park The public was aroused by this disaster and a ban on logging was put into effect in 1989. However, park rangers find it very difficult to stop the illegal cutting of trees from the National Parks.
But who is to blame for the destruction of the forest – the Thais who grow the trees? Goodyear or Michelin tire companies? Or all of us that drive cars that use rubber tires? Guess we must all share the blame.
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