Rubber

For a brief period, I was privileged to be the Chairman of one of the Commonweath Development Corporation's most pioneering investments: Compagnie Heveicole de Cavally, a rubber plantation and factory located in Cote d'Ivoire close to the Liberian border. It was a day's drive from Abidjan, the road passing through the town of Guiglo (notable only for a bloody clash between UN peacekeepers and Ivorian protestors in 2005), west to the village of Zagne and the final bumpy 70 km to Cavally.

I only visited the plantation three times, but each drive provided stark reminders of the casual looting of Africa's natural resources - in the shape of numerous trucks bearing huge logs, felled from natural forest, to the port for export. On one memorable occasion, we passed a truck bearing only one massive log, representing perhaps 500 years of growth. Three logs was the normal cargo.

At that time, Cavally as a business was struggling. Despite the fact that West Africa is one of the best places in the world to grow rubber, international rubber prices were low and the plantation was still immature. However, salvation was at hand. Not long thereafter, the price of oil began to rise on the international market and at the same time the price of synthetic rubber (an oil derivative) also began a steep climb. This in turn increased the demand for natural rubber by industrial users, and at one point resulted in a fourfold increase in rubber prices. This was wonderful news for Cavally and its investor - as the supply of natural rubber is now almost exclusively from plantations of the tree Hevea Brasiliensis and these trees, like any other, take a considerable amount of time to grow to maturity and full yield potential.

Like most commodities, rubber had seen price booms in the past. The most famous boom occurred not long after the Belfast resident John Dunlop created (and patented) the pneumatic rubber bicycle tyre in 1888. This simple invention drove a massive increase in the global demand for natural rubber -at that time the synthetic alternative had not been developed - for the production of bicycle and, not long afterwards, motor car tyres. It also drove one of the greatest tragedies of imperial rule in Africa: the rape and pillage of the so-called Congo Free State by King Leopold of Belgium and his accomplices. This hideous history is fully told in Adam Hochschild's compelling book King Leopold's Ghost.

Rubber is made from solidified sap. The best source is the Brazilian rubber tree, Hevea Brasiliensis, and this is now almost the exclusive global source of natural rubber. But rubber can also be obtained from other sources - and a particularly rich source was from the Landolphia vines which grow wild in the rain forests of equatorial Africa. As industrial demand increased and rubber prices skyrocketed, Leopold's administration employed all methods at its disposal to extract as much wild rubber as possible. For the rapacious imperialist Leopold, wild rubber was a Godsend: it required no costs other than labour and transport from the interior to the coast.

To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, conscripted Congolese villagers would slash them (slaughter-tapping) and dry the sap by coating their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be pulled off the skin, painfully, in a process akin to depillation by waxing. The killing of the vines made it even harder to locate sources of rubber as time went on, but the administration was relentless in raising the quotas, the spectacular profits from which financed Leopold's building programmes in Brussels and elsewhere in Europe, creating the "whited sepulchre" of Marlow's recollections in Conrad's classic novel Heart of Darkness. Certainly very little, if any, was reinvested in the Congo.

As the rubber boom continued, the administration became ever more brutal in its methods. Villages who failed to meet the rubber collection quotas had their women and children rounded up and held hostage while the men were sent into the rain forest to obtain rubber as the price for their freedom. It goes without saying that the women were regularly raped by their guards: a ghastly state-sponsored human rights abuse that echoes in the sexual violence which persists to this day throughout the Congo. Some villagers were required to pay for shortfalls in quotas with their lives, their deaths accounted for by severed hands, where each hand would prove a kill. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Leopold's private army, the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.

Was this Imperialism at its worst? Certainly on its scale and duration. Hochschild quotes Mark Twain's assertion that the rape of the Congo directly led to the deaths of five to eight million Congolese over the 20 year period from 1890 - 1910, all for the want of rubber. Today we would call it by its real name: genocide, but no trials await the long-departed Leopold.

The rubber industry has changed now, for the better. But there also remain other, subtler, forms of impoverishment at work. Rubber tapping is a lonely business, often carried out by migrant male workers compelled to seek the meagre wages on offer in order to support their families far away. Their lament is told by Jeremy Seabrook in the excellent book Victims of Development: Resistance and Alternatives, in his vignette of the migrant Malaysian rubber tapper, "alone among his 600 identical trees".