Rubber Tappers

The rubber tappers have lived in the Amazon rainforest for many generations, with an estimated population of around 500,000. For the past decades, the rubber tappers have been fighting against the landowners and companies who want to clear the forest to build cattle ranches, small scale farms or for logging purposes (Frank & Musacchio, 2008). As their livelihood is inextricably linked to the forest, deforestation will lead to the clearing of rubber trees and Brazilian nut trees for which the rubber tappers harvest for income. A typical rubber tapper would sell 50 kilograms of rubber a week for only 15,000 cruzeiros (1.85 SGD).

The contestation of land usage with the cattle ranchers leads to many conflicts and even death, as seen by the Chico Mendes’ assassination. Landowners who are clearing the land for cattle ranching justify their actions by the ownership of the land, thus they could do anything they want with it. Furthermore, they believed that cattle ranching is more economically feasible than rubber tapping due to the ever-increasing demand for beef in the global market. However, research by FUNTAC, the Brazilian government’s environmental agency, has shown that the extraction of rubber, nuts and other products by the rubber tapper is more lucrative in the long term as compared to cattle ranching. Furthermore, the soil in the Amazon rainforest is considered the most nutrient-poor soil in the world. Hence, farming using the cleared land is also not a viable economic option for the farmers (Hartl, 2019).

Rubber tapping is not a lucrative business for Brazil as it was during the Amazon Rubber Boom (1879 to 1912). Back then, Brazil was the highest exporter of natural rubber, selling almost 90% of the total rubber commercialised in the world (Frank & Musacchio, 2008). However, the European colonisation had brought rubber seed into South East Asia and created large plantations of rubber. Unlike the Brazilian rubber tappers who collect latex from trees grown in the wild, the plantations in South East Asia have more trees per hectares of land which create higher yield of latex. Along with abundance of cheap labour, South East Asia now has a competitive advantage over Brazil. Today, Brazil only accounts for 0.01% of the world’s total export for natural rubber (Workman, 2019).