Technology For Smallholder Survival

The only available option for rubber smallholders to survive and prosper in the coming days is to adopt established and viable technologies, and for the Government, to provide them monetary grants to invest in such technologies

- Dr. Sivakumaran

It is an established fact that rubber smallholders over decades of their existence have been subjected to boom and bust cycles as characterised by vagaries of widely fluctuating rubber prices. They are at the mercy and held to ransom by rubber prices over which they have no influence or control whatsoever. The bust phases due to depressed prices inevitably drive them into cyclical periods of poverty which render mere survival economically very challenging and insurmountable. This is further accentuated in bulk of the rubber smallholdings which are characterized by uneconomic size per holding (less than 3 hectares) with limited upside for increased yield production with use of conventional exploitation systems.

Desperate measures

Rubber smallholders in most NR countries during periods of depressed prices resort to desperate measures to overcome the impact of low rubber prices on their livelihood. These measures include maximizing yield productivity through very intensive tapping with long cuts on daily tapping thus sacrificing valuable productive bark without compensatory yield increase and shortened economic life of trees, abandoning tapping altogether and taking on temporary jobs if available, cutting down rubber trees and opting for cultivation of other crops and opting for early replanting effectively incurring loss of income from rubber trees over several years. These desperate measures adopted by smallholders do not provide them with long-term solutions. While some of these measures may provide temporary relief from economic hardship, the others will not provide any immediate solutions for their financial difficulties.