Rubber Estate Tour

This past Wednesday the Wizard maneuvered our group’s bus, the Castlerock, into the Chittady estate rubber plantation in Mundakayam in Kottayam district of the state of Kerala. All seventeen of us departed and were immediately led on a tour of the plantation by the kind faced, bowl-bellied manager, Jagdish. He walked us down a gravel drive past sunny fields of pineapples and let us take a few with us. The pineapples crops are grown by other farmers who lease the land from the rubber estate owners. The estate owner explained that they often use cover crops in between the rubber trees so as to absorb nitrogen and enrich the soil. The acidic level of the soil is a critical factor controlled in the rubber industry, as the trees require a level of between 5 and 5.5 pH in order to thrive. Rubber trees grow quickly, I learned as I peered up the trunk of a twenty five foot tree that was only three years old. The estate has thousands of such trees, all ranging between one and thirty two years old. It is a prosperous sector in Kerala’s economy and produces everything from car tires to condoms, band-aids and tar.
The co-owner walked us into the shade of a latex tree forest, telling us as he stopped besides a trunk that each tree is tapped for twenty five years and each cut mark sealed with adhesive, patching up old wounds, marks one year’s use. After the trees have passed their prime latex giving age, they are used in the plywood industry. The whole operation sounds a lot more sustainable than I’d expected. No stories of human laborer exploitation, overuse of land, or overharvesting of trees here. Men and women are hired in equal numbers and while wages are lower than those of most agricultural workers, they are much higher than in many other parts of the world and in differing Indian states. I was pleased to hear that women make the same wages as men do.
Thomas, the thinner, spectacled estate owner told us that people are starting to appear from other parts of the sub continent in search of tapping jobs in Kerala. Tappers are done with their work by 11:00 or 12:00 in the afternoon and can then go work other agricultural jobs. Laborers are additionally aided by the state as small holders, who make up 95% of all involved in the sector, are initially subsidized. Each tapper’s job includes using machetes to cut slits in the tree trunks of the four hundred latex trees in their plot, collecting the white slippery liquid in pails, and later the thin stretchy extra drippings which are bundled and sold to tire manufacturers. Their wages are determined every three years by a tripartite group including the state, the worker’s union, and the owners. Each tapper has to sell a minimum of eight kilos of latex and currently priced at two hundred and twenty rupees for each kilo, that puts workers in a fair place.
Prices didn’t always used to be as high as they are now. Just five years ago one kilo collected only thirty five to forty rupees. The new price can closely be connected to the spiking global prices of oil. Additionally rubber prices are raising in accordance with global demand increases. China is the largest consumer of natural rubber and as the Chinese economy grows and produces much of the world’s goods, churns more cars out and puts more tires on tar roads, latex is increasingly involved. Thomas sees no need to worry about global competition undercutting Kerala’s rubber industry. Kerala produces 95% of rubber in India, 755,000 tonnes whereas India as a whole produces 825,000 tonnes. Thomas’ company is thriving, drawing 7,000 kilos per day; the cheaper producers of Indonesia are of no threat to Kerala’s rubber estates. This was my favorite component of our trip this far, as I felt like we were in the field communicating with local agriculturalist and getting an in-depth look at one of India’s leading industries.