Rubbery figures

Yesterday's story about Top Glove in Malaysia making lots of money from the heightened demand for medical rubber gloves made me realise that I didn't really know where most of the world's rubber now comes from.   The perfect question for the internet!

World Atlas has this table:

I wouldn't have guessed that China now produces more rubber than Malaysia. 

Actually, those figures are just for 2013, and I see that other sites say that the top three are Thailand, Indonesia, then Malaysia (and the amount produced by countries 3 to 6 in the table above are pretty close - so maybe 2013 was just a bad year for Malaysian rubber plantations for some reason?)

Anyway, not sure I knew this bit of rubber trivia:

Although the Hevea tree is native to South America, cultivation there is limited due to the high prevalence of leaf blight diseases and other natural predators.

 See - globalisation is good.

I might have guessed that the rubber glove industry doing well would mean that the price of natural rubber would be holding up.   But I guess it only uses a tiny amount in the big picture.  Hence The Association of Natural Rubber Producing Countries has this bit of not so great news:

The key factor behind the abnormal fall in the prices of natural rubber (NR) since mid-January is the huge drop in the world demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The world consumption of NR dropped by 15.7% during H1 2020 (Jan-Jun 2020) as per the revised estimates. In China, the country accounting 40% of the world demand, the consumption fell by 20.1% during H1 2020.

It is relieving to observe that the worst is almost over as far as the world consumption of NR is concerned. The world consumption is now set to enter positive territory by increasing 1.4%, year-on-year, during Q3 2020 (Jul-Sep).  The consumption in China, in particular, is expected to increase by 0.8%, year-on-year, during the same quarter. Although the International Monitory Fund a week ago has further scaled down the global economic outlook for 2020, to -4.9% growth from -3.0% projected in April, the consumption sector of NR has almost returned to normal with the exception of a few countries. 

Now that I am on a rubber bender, so to speak, reading up on the history of the product, I see that Brazil was the victim of, well, if not industrial espionage, certainly undercover dirty business (there are a lot of similar examples from other products, over the centuries):  

From 1850 to 1920, businessmen were pushing entrepreneurs and traders to increase the amount of rubber extracted from Amazonian trees. During this period, the Brazilian Amazon was the only source of rubber and they controlled the price, making rubber expensive. At the same time, as more and more industry was developing in Europe and USA, more uses for rubber were being found [4]. Rubber was such an important material for Brazilians that they prohibited the export of rubber seeds or seedlings. However, in 1876, H. A. Wickham managed to smuggle 70,000 rubber seeds, hidden in banana leaves, and brought them to England. From those seeds, only 1,900 seedlings survived and were sent to Malaysia to start the first rubber plantations in Asia. This marked the beginning of the end for Brazil as the world’s main rubber producer.