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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 whose 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 
yet 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 mani?oba 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 well 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 150 of the Par& 
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 
