As I entered adolescence, the word gained a deeper meaning, it being the most common euphemism in America for a condom, because it too was made from what my dictionary calls “the highly elastic solid substance obtained from the milky juice of various tropical trees and plants.” Some of those little packets that American adolescents like me carried in their wallets until they fell apart (unused) said “Made in Thailand.” Now I live in Thailand, so I decided to go to the source.
Welcome to Trang, the first place a rubber tree was planted in Thailand almost exactly one hundred years ago, in 1899, (brought from Indonesia by the provincial governor, although the rubber tree originated in Brazil). Today, rubber is the nation’s second largest agricultural product after rice, thriving in the Kingdom’s humid climate so well that it is the world’s third largest exporter, following Malaysia and Indonesia.
In Trang, as in much of the nation’s southern peninsula, there are vast stands of rubber, where trees lined up like sentries form long, dark tunnels and men still go out before dawn with miner’s lamps on their heads to make foot-long diagonal cuts in the bark, placing a plastic bowl at the bottom of the “tap” to catch the dripping sap. Two hours later, the bowls are emptied, the white gooey latex is stored in plastic barrels for a day, then poured into what look like deep baking trays and mixed with sulfuric acid to aid coagulation, forming malleable pillows which are then flattened by hand and (literally) foot. Finally, they are pushed through hand-cranked metal rollers and draped over bamboo poles in the yard to dry, looking like bleached doormats. Five days later—assuming it doesn’t rain—the now translucent mats are taken in the family pickup truck or on the back of a motor-bike to collection points and sold by the kilo.
The work hours are long, starting as early as midnight on some of the larger plantations and continuing through much of the day. The labor is also unpredictable. The latex flows best when the weather is cool and the air is still. Warmer, windier weather is not so good and you can’t cut when it rains or the leaves fall, or in the spring when the new leaves are coming in. This means tappers may sometimes work only 120 to 160 days a year.
Nor is it always an attractive investment for landowners, who must wait five to seven years before a tree is ready for tapping, and replant every twenty-five to thirty years. Rubber grows better in poor soil than do cash crops such as sugarcane and maize, but the work is as labor-intensive today as it was when the business was growing up with the new automobile industry. And with world economies bouncing like, well, a rubber ball, market prices are unpredictable, too. In 1999, the slump in economies worldwide plus stiff competition drove the price in Thailand well below break-even.
Kam Nuchitsiripatra is a third-generation rubber planter who knows the market well. His grandfather migrated to Thailand from China in 1917. By the time Kam was fourteen he could “tap” eight hundred trees in a day, so he hired someone to collect the latex as he continued to cut and asked his grandfather for fifty percent of the earnings. At sixteen, he introduced a stronger, more productive strain of tree to Trang and sold cuttings from the new trees to other farmers. Stick one of the cuttings into plain red earth and in six weeks you had a plantable tree.
Kam is called “famous” in Trang province. Besides the thousand or so mature trees his workers tap on land he owns outside the city, he still has a backyard “farm” in town where he sells cuttings. As head of the local rubber planters association, he is also a storehouse of facts. There are six million acres (2.3 million hectares) of rubber in Thailand, spread across twenty-two provinces, mainly in the south, he says, a half-million of the acres in Trang. The export of rubber currently brings about US$2 billion to Thailand annually, and a family makes about US$1,750 a year. Rubber may once have made millionaires of colonial plantation owners (in what was then called Indochine, Indonesia, and Malaya), but today the world price is so low, Thailand’s government pays farmers to replant.
Choosit Lee, another third-generation rubber worker, is the factory manager at Sri Trang Agro-Industry, where in a warehouse larger than two airplane hangers about four hundred tons of the latex sheets are washed and dried every day, then graded and bundled for resale, a job he holds, in part, because he speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, and two southern Chinese dialects, Thai, Malay, English, and Japanese; his company sells to factories around the world, making him handy to have around when the phone rings. He is teaching his two young children Mandarin and English, but they, he insists with a laugh, probably won’t be interested in following in their father’s footsteps when it’s time to choose a career.
As on the plantation, he tells me, in the factory, too, little has changed in a hundred years. There are forklifts now, and regular coffee breaks for the employees, but much is still Dickensian, reminiscent of an earlier, harsher era. Here, in a building six acres in size, endless piles of rubber sheets on pallets are brought to the ends of massive cement tubs full of water for washing. Men throw armloads of the sheets into the waist-deep water and other men inside the tubs wearing only shorts hold on to bamboo scaffolding overhead and stomp on the floating mats to separate mold and other external impurities, kicking the mats forward to where women standing in the water flip them one by one between rollers to remove the surface water. The pace is frantic and the noise and water splashing recalls a public wading pool for children on a hot summer day. But you know this isn’t fun.
As the sheets come through the rollers, they’re draped over bamboo racks, taken by forklift and stacked ten meters high in metal rooms for smoking, to remove the last moisture inside the rubber. Five days later, the sheets emerged baked to a golden brown and smelling eerily like kippers, or smoked herring, the popular English breakfast dish.
Now embedded bits of dirt, insects and air bubbles are cut away by hand with scissors and the sheets are graded individually according to the quality of what’s left. The cleanest rubber is graded highest and is sold for the best price to firms making tires for airplanes and luxury automobiles. The coarser stuff is used for truck tires and everything left over, including the bits cut out of the sheets with the dirt, is turned into rubber slippers.
Like the pig, where everything is used except for the squeal, little of the rubber tree is wasted. The wood, lightweight and easy to work with, as well as abundantly available, is made into furniture and toys, from dollhouses to blocks to spinning tops. Because Thailand has banned the logging of most trees, rubber wood now accounts for seventy percent of raw materials for the country’s wooden furniture industry.
There’s also a market for the liquid latex, brought to the factory in tanker trucks. Choosit Lee takes me to a rise on the property, one of the highest points in the province, he says. Below and stretching to low mountains miles away are the countless rows of trees. Here, a cargo that looks like melted vanilla ice cream is pumped into company trucks and transported to nearby Hat Yai, where hand-sized molds are dipped into it to form rubber gloves, ubiquitous around the world.
In ways too numerous to count, this stuff thus plays a role in more people’s lives than possibly any other man-made product, save perhaps steel and electricity. Remove rubber from the earth and you lose what must be history’s favorite toy, the ball, you leave most land and air vehicles without tires and inner tubes, and homes and offices and shops go wanting the rubber band, while children are denied something with which to correct mistakes and party balloons to blow up.