THE TREE THAT TRAVELS

In the 120" year of India’s first rubber plantation, an ambitious planting project is taking shape in the northeast

- BY NAVIN J. ANTONY

In 2017, two companies partly owned by rubber farmers in rural Kerala exported sheets of natural rubber to a manufacturing company in São Paulo, Brazil's commercial capital. In money terms, it was a low-value, low-volume deal-around 60 metric tonnes worth around 1 crorebut in terms of historical significance, it was rather big.

A bit of backstory first: Brazil is the home of rubber, because of which the tree that yields natural rubber is called Hevea brasiliensis. In the 19th century, the rubber tree grew only in the Amazon rainforest, which helped Brazil nearly monopolise the global rubber market. The British, ardent free-marketeers when faced with monopolies not their own, dispatched an explorer named Henry Wickham in the 1870s. Wickham collected around 70,000 rubber seeds from groves in Amazon and smuggled them to the Royal Botanical Garden in London. The 'theft' helped the British jump-start cultivation in colonies in Southeast Asia, effectively ending Brazil's dominance. Within decades, cheap but good-quality rubber from fledgling Asian plantations finished off the Amazon wild rubber industry.

In short, the consignment from Kerala to São Paulo was sort of a homecoming. The deal also reflected the vagaries of the modern international commodity market-much like the Arabs who have to import sand from Europe and Australia (because wind-blown desert sand is too fine for construction), Brazilians have to occasionally depend on rubber farmers who are half a world away in Kerala.