77 



of Para rubber, almost entirely composed of the wild rubber from the 

 forests of the Amazon basin, fell off in 1909 in spite of the frenzied 

 demand for rubber from so many branches of trade, the orders of the 

 United States automobile industry especially being unprecedented, 

 and so great is the difficulty in obtaining labour to collect the wild 

 rubber in Amazonas and Acre, that the rubber extractors in the 

 limitless forests did not furnish a large quotum during the past year 

 than in those years when the world's consumption was less. 



The extent of the natural rubber forests of the Amazon Valley, a 

 vast zone of 1,000,000 square miles producing the finest Para rubber, 

 is still unknown, and perhaps only a fraction of these forests has been 

 exploited and scarcely more explored. Each year some fresh steam 

 or tributary is discovered w^hose banks are profusely covered with 

 hevea trees, the most important discoveries in 1909 being those in the 

 valley of the Xingu River. Away from the streams which constitute 

 the naturul means of approach there are still vast tracts of forest 

 about whose commercial possibilities no clear estimate has or can be 

 made. Although it might seem that their output could be made to 

 vary with the demands of the rubber industries, it is the case that the 

 better the conditions are for wild rubber the worse they are of human 

 habitation, and so dense are the forests, so damp their climate, and 

 the means of reaching them so difficult that large plantations of rub- 

 ber trees are being made in Brazil in regions easier of access and, in 

 proportion to the amount of capital invested in exploiting wild rubber 

 forests, a considerable amount is being invested in Brazilian planta- 

 tions. 



Though no plantations of hevea to any important extent have as 

 3^et been recorded from the Amazon Valley, where Federal and State 

 Governments alike encourage plantations, in the States of Parahyba, 

 Ceara and Bahia rubber trees were planted, largely manicoba and 

 jecquie. In those States manicoba and mangabeira grow wild in some 

 abundance. 



Manitoba and mangabeira rubbers are priced some 40 or 50 per 

 cent, lower than the Para rubber. When prices become permanently 

 lower, as would seem inevitable in view of the threatened competition 

 of the Asiatic plantations, the Brazilian exports of these two varieties 

 will suffer severely owing to their high cost of production, and the 

 scarcity, as v/ell as the high cost of labour in Ceara and Bahia and the 

 high taxation of agricultural products. Jecquie rubber, which, like 

 the two kinds mentioned above, is grown largely in the State of Bahia, 

 brings almost as good a price as Para rubber, and from 600 to 1,000 

 trees can be planted to an acre, as compared with 1 50 of the Para 

 variety. They require only five years to be ready for tapping — some 

 two years less than the Para tree. 



The initiative in any reform for protecting the trees and for im- 

 proving the methods of preparing the rubber for delivery — a reform 

 which is called for throughout the rubber zone of Brazil— is more 

 likely to proceed from the Federal ^Ministry of Agriculture, which has 



